


Dimidium Animae Meae

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Case Fic, Child Death, Child Murder, Drama, Gen, Horrible Things, Kidnapping, Runner up of the 2016 Profiler's Choice Awards Best Team/Case, Suspense, Team as Family, intercision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-05-22 19:43:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6091936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Intercision; the once forgotten practise of severing the bond between a human and their dæmon. The most unforgivable crime. When children begin to go missing, everyone fears the worst. When the children are returned, their fears are realized. </p><p>There's no treatment. There's no cure. </p><p>And, for a member of the BAU trapped within the facility itself, there's absolutely no time.</p><p>  <strong> Runner up of the 2016 Profiler's Choice Awards Best Team/Case </strong></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Français available: [Dimidium Animae Meae](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10471197) by [Malohkeh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malohkeh/pseuds/Malohkeh)



> The dæmons used are the same as the ones in my His Dark Mind universe, with the one main difference that Hotch/Reid aren't together in this fic. This one is meant to be read as a standalone, so it will reintroduce those dæmons for those new to them.
> 
> For those who are unfamiliar with the His Dark Materials universe, this is basically all you need to know (taken from the wiki)
> 
> **"A dæmon /ˈdiːmən/ is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech—regardless of the form they take—and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons and their humans are almost always of different genders."**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _Her first impulse was to turn and run, or to be sick. A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out: something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of night-ghasts, not the waking world of sense._
> 
> **Phillip Pullman, _Northern Lights_**

Perfection was an absolute concept. When he looked at people on the street, any person at random, he could see the potential for perfection laced upon their very skin. Their bodies, made of a complex tapestry of bones and muscle and matter, were shackled to the minds and the _beasts_ that kept them bound to their imperfect conceptualities of the world. He despised how ordinary they were. How ordinary they remained, even when he offered them excellence.

He had wanted to be the first. As soon as he had discovered how to become perfect, how to _free_ himself from the beasts, he had desired it with a passion that left him breathless. But he could not. For the glory of others, he suffered in his defective form. Unlike them, he did it out of love. Because, although he despised them, he also loved them, and wasn’t it the way of a God to suffer for his people? The people whose glory he alone held the key to unlocking, their salvation in his palm.

One by one, he delivered unto them the gift of the perfection they deserved. And they fought him at first, because it was their way to distrust those that offered them freedom. Was it not Jesus himself who’d said, _“Unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe”?_

They would see. He suffered for them, and one day they would know this.

Striding up the hall to the room where the woman cowered in her imperfection, he shivered with anticipation of her deliverance. Her and the filthy beast that kept her tethered; the earthly creature that filled her perfect body with animalistic thoughts and desires and made her unfit for his regard. His own sinfulness followed behind him with loping strides, the beat of its paws like a drumbeat of his own failings and a reminder of the importance of this one woman.

For he must remain upon earth with the beasts, but he would send her to her rapture in his stead, because their sins were one and the same and through her he would find his release. He passed rooms with unlocked doors, the inhabitants lost in the ecstasy of their release. He passed rooms with the doors tightly sealed, the screams of the depravities within an audible promise of his importance here in this world, until he found the last door. Unlocking it with a hand that shook, it was the barest sign of his fear and the great importance of this final liberation. She didn’t react when he entered the tiny space, the bare walls and floors cast into an even plainer light by her beauty.

She hadn’t been screaming. She was stronger than that, he had known that as soon as he’d first touched her. She had simply been waiting for him. Some small part of her had desired this, desired becoming his vessel. Even as the ropes cut into her pale flesh, her arms and legs binding her into genuflection, she didn’t struggle. He looked up at the delicate framework of the machine above her, the blade that blurred the air around it with its keenness. The blade that would fall and grant her ascension. Savouring the moment, he almost didn’t want to do it. Not yet. He wanted to treasure this moment.

But the rituals must be followed.

“Your name and the term you refer to your creature as,” he stated coldly. Her blue eyes stared back, fierce and wild and framed by white-blonde hair. She would be glorious when saved.

“Answer me,” he repeated when she didn’t answer. The beast reared up protectively from within the cage it was trapped in, seeking to stop him from removing it from her soul like a surgeon would slice away a cancerous growth. It wouldn’t help. No matter how much they fought, none escaped. He carved the foulness from them and cleansed the remains in fire, leaving them clean. Black and gold; ash and Dust. He would bathe her in the remnants of her dæmon to celebrate her rebirth.

“Go to hell,” she spat. The creature, a darker copy of his own, bared its teeth and arched its back at him, long ears folded back.

Very well. He always hated to do this.

The gun was heavy and cold in his hand, a reminder of the power he dealt. Blue eyes tracked it as he aimed it at the animal in the thinly meshed cage. He wouldn’t hesitate to shoot it, even if it meant the loss of her. She was perfection, but he would find another. He was eternally patient.

“Answer me,” he said for the final time.

She paled as the gun followed the small form. “Jennifer,” she said finally. Now, only now, did she begin to struggle. Kicking wildly at the framework of its confines, the animal seemed to also realize how close they both were to its end. “Special Agent Jennifer Jareau with the FBI. You don’t have to do this. We can help you, if you let us.”

He smiled warmly, because this was the beginning of something beautiful, even if she couldn’t see it yet. “You’re already helping me, Jennifer. You have no idea how important you are. Now, your beast, speak its name.”

The only sound was the faintest cry from the hall and her own ragged breathing. Then she answered, and her fate was sealed. The fate of her, and the fate of the devil in the shape of a hare that had latched onto her soul like a parasite.

“Aureilo.”

And he dropped the blade, the sound of it slicing the air, impossibly sharp.

They both screamed.


	2. See how they run...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
> 
> See how they run. See how they run.
> 
> Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
> 
> As three blind mice?

There were days when the stack of files on her desk seemed insurmountable. Days when it seemed impossible to pick which atrocity within that stack to focus on first. Days when she opened page after page and saw Henry in every one of the sprawled and empty lives: this one has his hair, this one his smile, this a mother and a father who love him just as dearly.

Days when Kailo’s butter-yellow wings seemed dulled by the horrors of their job. It wasn’t just her. She’d seen Elle burn out spectacularly, driven to the edge of despair and then over without a pause, fighting her destruction with a ferret’s ferocity that hadn’t saved her. And she’d seen Gideon and his hawk dæmon both fall from their lofty perch, almost bringing the rest of them down with them.

Those were the kind of days when Morgan’s boxer dæmon clung close to his heels, her tail low. When Spence’s hare tucked himself under his chair with his eyes closed, trembling with the strain that Spencer himself refused to let show. Even Emily—Emily with the cat dæmon who never had a whisker out of place—had days when her hand lingered just a little bit longer on her dæmon’s glossy fur than it usually would; when his purrs were just ever so slightly forced.

Today was, so far, not one of those days. Today the stack was small. The cases heartbreaking, but none monstrous. The paperwork done, the lights dim, and they were going out. A team reconnecting over a meal and drinks and, if Morgan had his way, a dancefloor. Sometimes she felt guilty that she could still have fun like this when there was just _so_ much suffering in the world, but without it they’d shatter. Like Elle. Like Gideon. JJ couldn’t watch that happen again, and so they reconnected.

As her office door closed, her shoulders relaxed, an invisible load lifted. No more tough choices today, said the final click of that latch. Below her, Spencer was animated, alive, gesturing wildly with his hands to try and explain some complicated concept to the blankly grinning Morgan. Emily watched them both, sitting catlike on her desk with her hand over her mouth to hide a smile. And the day was done. They’d all survived. She was thankful for every day that brought that blessing.

“Almost done?” she asked, peering into Hotch’s office. The man sat at his desk, straight backed and straight faced, Halaimon a statue at his side. The wolf posed an intimidating sight, coming easily to JJ’s elbow in height and coal-back with unfathomable eyes. There was something endlessly reserved about the man and his dæmon, some sense of a great strength restrained by prodigious willpower. Anger, as well. They’d all seen that anger unleashed. None of them had any desire to see it again.

“Hmm?” Hotch said, looking up with his face smoothing into the suggestion of smile at the sight of her. “Almost. This report is taking longer than expected.”

She stepped in, glancing down at it. Kailo whispered a laugh as they both recognised the cramped handwriting on the page, tightly bunched on the lines and sprawling along the margins where he’d run out of space. “You really need to give Spence a word limit on those things,” she said. “You’d better hurry—I think the kids are getting overexcited down there.”

“You know, they use his reports as examples of ‘what not to do’ with the new recruits,” Rossi said cheerfully from behind them. JJ didn’t even need to turn to know who it was, not when a soft clap of feathers and a gust of displaced air over her head announced the arrival of Eris. The owl clattered onto the desk with a deliberate clumsiness, sending papers and pens scattering. JJ winced as a file landed with a soft _thwop_ on Hal’s head, flapping open and slipping slowly down her spine to lay loosely on the floor. Neither Hotch nor Hal flinched, Hal staring the owl down with a dark gaze that would have had any _sane_ dæmon scampering for safety.

“Oops, sorry,” said the owl, sounding anything but, shuffling over to the side of the desk to crane her neck down and peer at Hal. “What a _bother_. Guess you’ll have to sort it out Monday.”

Hal’s nose twitched. JJ held her breath, seeing one of Hotch’s eyebrows rocket up into his hairline. She didn’t dare glance behind her, because if she did she had absolutely no doubt that Rossi was leaning casually against the doorframe, _smirking._ He was a smirker. And if she saw that, she was going to laugh.

“Guess we’ll have to,” Hotch said finally, leaning down to pick the file up and neaten it before ever so slowly standing and grabbing his jacket as he tossed the file onto his desk. “Alright, alright, let’s go.” Hal got up and walked with sedate grace towards the door, but her tail waved slowly in what was almost a wagging motion.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Emily wondered just who was in charge of picking the forms that dæmons took. Whoever it was, they had a _terrible_ sense of humour. Watching Morgan on the dancefloor was proof enough of that. Well sure, one look at Hotch and his grim wolf and anyone would be like _yep, the dæmon reflects the man alright_ , and Rossi’s eagle owl was practically a given as well. They had the same eyebrows, as Sergio had pointed out with glee upon meeting them.

JJ though. A butterfly? Pretty, flimsy things that were carried about by the breeze? Hardly. And then there was Morgan, once you got to know him. He was no dog. “I’ve seen alley cats with better moves than that,” Sergio commented, batting around the lid of a beer bottle absently with his paw, half his attention on Morgan and his dæmon trying—succeeding—in getting woman to dance with him. “Look at him. No class. It’s a wonder any of those women are interested.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flicker of movement cease as Reid abruptly tuned into the conversation. “Actually, numerous studies have suggested that confidence is the key—hey!”

Emily raised an eyebrow at Garcia as Reid tried to talk around the toffee she’d popped into his mouth when his guard was down. “You came prepared for Reid-ness?” she asked her, Garcia’s innocent expression completely ruined by the cackling warble of the magpie dæmon perched on her shoulder.

“Oh, hun, I’m always prepared for Reid-ness,” Garcia replied. Reid made a choked swallowing sound as he battled the sticky treat. With a nervous titter, she slipped out the booth: “And now that I’ve showed my hand, I’m off to rescue my alley cat from himself. Enjoy that, lovelies!” And then she was gone, leaving Emily alone with the spluttering Reid.

Emily could see the rest of her team easily: Morgan was creating a small crowd on the dancefloor, Garcia was damn hard to miss, and she’d have to be blind to miss Rossi introducing himself smoothly to a table of ladies who tittered in response. It wasn’t hard to spot Hotch either. His seat at the bar, JJ at his left, was notable by the absence of anyone else around him. Even in the crowded room, people were reluctant to sit near the hulking presence of the wolf laying at his side.

“She’s not a full wolf you know,” Reid said, his voice barely carrying over the reverberating bass. He’d traced her gaze to their boss, his own expression thoughtful. “Her ears and muzzle give it away. Part dog, for sure. Conflicting natures: the domestic vs. the wild. There are several theories—”

“Profiling the Hotchman, Reid?” she asked, turning to face him and lifting her beer to her lips. Reid was placidly shredding a napkin into a tiny shower of white confetti on the table, his own drink barely touched and his dæmon nowhere to be seen. That was nothing new. Aureilo hated the stickiness of bars or getting his fur mussed up, and he absolutely _despised_ being surrounded by people. Reid would never complain, but Emily knew it was no coincidence the hare was always notably absent on these outings. She envied Reid his ability to, apparently, painlessly separate from his dæmon. She’d never met anyone else with the ability but, then again, she’d never met anyone quite like Spencer Reid before either.

“You know they teach us not to profile based on dæmons,” he said, and now that she’d noticed the lack of hare at his feet, she could detect the faint tone of disconnection in his voice that came with that distance, as though half his mind was elsewhere. _Ass._ He could still be brilliant, even like this. She had no idea how he did it. “There are too many variations, too much singularity to each case. One man might have a cat because he craves comfort, another may have a cat because she aspires to perfection.” His eyes were locked on her now, and there was no trace of disconnection in that sharp gaze. “Or because she needs complete control over the way she presents herself to the world. Who knows?”

_Ass._ “Is that so?” she teased. Sergio swept his tail through the pile of white paper in front of Reid, sending the pieces whirling through the air to settle on their hands and clothes and to bob about in their untouched drinks. “And what of the man with the hare dæmon that never shuts up? What would you say of him?”

“I’d say,” Reid said carefully, ducking his head to hide a shy smile, “that’s he’s probably tired and ready for bed, but afraid that if he gets up to leave, he’ll be accused of being anti-social and dragged onto the dancefloor. I’d also say he’s unlikely to be very good at dancing. Uh oh. JJ.”

Emily turned again, the cracked leather of the booth underneath complaining under her weight, just in time to see JJ heading for the door with her cell to her ear. Hotch watched her, his own drink back on the bar and untouched. As she watched, the door swung closed behind JJ, and Hotch ordered a water.

Well, _fuck_. “Hope you didn’t have your heart set on bed,” she warned Reid, noting his crestfallen expression. “Looks like our weekend is over. All five hours of it.”

“Typical,” he said, and drained his scotch with a long smooth pull after fishing out the napkin-confetti and setting the glass down with a loud _clink_ on the tabletop. She handed him his coat, their fingers brushing together, leaving her own damp with condensation. His hands were cold. She hoped this case, whatever it was, wasn’t a bad one, but she knew that was a useless hope. They were all bad.

 

* * *

 

Naemaria’s hackles lifted when Morgan propped the tablet up on the arm of his chair so she could peer over his side to look. “There are so few similarities,” she commented, and he could feel her shiver slightly through the leather of the armrest. “Age, appearance, socio-economic status: they’re all so varied. They’re basically grabbing kids at random. How did we not know about this before now?”

Reid didn’t look up from where he was paging quickly through a thick sheaf of papers, but they all knew by now that he didn’t need to be cognizant of the conversation for them to get the benefit of his mind. “We did,” Aureilo said, standing on his hind legs with his front paws propped on the table and staring directly into Morgan’s eyes with an almost challenging gaze. It wasn’t unusual; the hare had a disconcerting habit of _demanding_ attention when he spoke, which was often, and it was hard to disobey that silent snap of command. “We just didn’t realize they were related. No one connected them until now, but we’ve all seen the cases individually on the news.”

Morgan would never admit it, but as much as he loved his Pretty-Boy Reid… his dæmon was unnerving as shit. Dæmons weren’t supposed to talk to humans other than their own. Dæmons weren’t supposed to be polar opposites of their human’s personality. And they really, _really_ weren’t supposed to treat the bond between themselves and their humans like it was just a suggestion instead of a rule, straying as far from Reid as he wished without any regard for how it made Reid _look_. But Aureilo did all those things. Morgan swallowed down the weird feeling he always got around the hare and answered while looking at the top of Reid’s head instead of that uncanny amber gaze.

“We have five children missing between the ages of six and twelve, all from different small towns and rural areas of Georgia. All went missing in the past two weeks. That’s a huge hunting ground if they’re travelling.”

“It’s 59,441 square miles,” Reid said quietly, not looking up from his paperwork. “But they’re mostly centred around the one area. That narrows it down.” Aureilo glanced at him, almost disdainfully, before switching his stare back to the team. Morgan shivered again. He hated Georgia. Kid wasn’t like this before Georgia. It was like the further Reid withdrew into himself, the more Aureilo tried to compensate. 

“None had settled dæmons,” Emily added, enlarging a picture of the most recently taken: a girl of seven, blonde haired and blue eyed and with a wide, blue winged butterfly dæmon perched on her ear. Morgan looked away from that picture and found JJ staring at it as though her heart was breaking. He didn’t look at her for long.  Sometimes he was damn glad he wasn’t a parent. He didn’t think he could do this job with a kid at home reminding him of his own vulnerabilities.

“Irrelevant, isn’t it?” Rossi asked. “The oldest is twelve. How many dæmons settle at twelve?”

“Actually,” Reid said, snapping to attention, “we’ve got three girls in this group. Two of them are over ten—puberty, often accompanied by the settlement of dæmonic forme, begins earlier in girls. Statistically, the fact that he has a one-hundred-percent frequency of taking children with unsettled dæmons could be relevant.” And just like that, he turned back to the page and shut them out completely. Emily stared at him thoughtfully.

Hotch _hmm_ ed softly. “Discounting that, we still have three children who left for school and never made it home. Two who went out on weekends to the local park and didn’t return. Not one witness saw them being approached, there were no notable strangers in any of the towns that people could recall.” His eyes pinned each and every one of them, mirrored by his wolf, goading them into getting their minds ticking. Morgan could see them all responding to that, expressions turning focused and intent. The jet shuddered under them and no one even blinked. “We’re heading for Buford, Gwinnet County. The geographical profile of the taken children so far suggests that our unsub is likely based in the area, and the local forces have invited us in. One of the children, the first taken, is from the town.”

“The kids do have one thing in common,” Aureilo said suddenly, almost cutting off the tail end of Hotch’s sentence. He waited a moment until they were looking at him, then stretched a paw towards the photos of the missing children resting under the side of Reid’s hand. “They’re all very atheistically pleasing. No glasses, no braces, considerable symmetry of facial features. The biological sex of the child is less of a focus in sexual predators who hunt younger children than it is in those who have older preferences—we should consider child trafficking.”

“On the basis of five pretty kids?” Morgan snapped, irritation sparked by the matter-of-fact tone in the hare’s voice. Reid was never so pushy with his damn opinions. It was a weird feeling, to like the man but not the dæmon.

“Only five?” Reid said, his voice cautious. Silence followed, and he glanced up, reshuffling the papers. The sheet he laid on the table wasn’t their file at all, but a hastily photocopied city council report with ‘Homeless population numbers reduced’ scrawled across the top. “Georgia’s poverty rate is the third highest in the country. Gwinnet County has almost fourteen percent of their population living below the poverty line. It has a serious homelessness problem—in 2012, there were 26,300 evictions in Gwinnet County alone. That equals approximately 120,562 family members that lost housing, including children. And the average age of homeless children in the area is—”

“Six.” Rossi lowered his phone, looking troubled. “You don’t think these are our first victims, do you?”

Reid shrugged, his eyes locked on his dæmon. “I don’t think a first-time kidnapper manages to take five children in two weeks without a single witness. Do you?”

 

* * *

 

Hotch rapped his fingers on the steering wheel, his mind whirling with the pictures of the missing children. How could the unsub have taken _five_ children without a witness, without a fight? Five children, five dæmons. Did none of them scream? Did none of them run?

He thought of Jack at the park, mere weeks ago, and the scream both he and his dæmon had put up when Hotch was out of sight for just a second. Ever since Haley, ever since Foyet, Jack hated being away from him or Jessica. It was troubling, but also somewhat reassuring. No one could take Jack without Arelys shifting into a snarling, miniature Hal with her shrieking barks alerting everyone in the vicinity. So why didn’t these children’s dæmons offer them the same protection?

Reid was silent next to him, his hands folded in his lap over the huddled brown-gold mass of his hare. Over the years of working with him, Hotch had assumed that at some point the kid would come out of his shell. He hadn’t, at least with him. Hotch had stopped expecting it at this point. Any progress they’d made with him had been lost after… well, this job left them all with scars.

Some more so than others.

“Jennifer exhibited considerable signs of distress at the photo of Kayla Chant,” Aureilo said suddenly, flicking his ears upright. Hotch could hear Hal moving about restlessly in the back seat, always awkward in the confined space of the car. “Likely because of the physical similarities between the child and Jennifer, and Henry of course. Her ability to remain—”

“Don’t profile her,” Reid said, flicking his hare’s ear and cutting him off with an indignant squeak. “We don’t do that to each other. She’s _fine_.”

Reid so rarely spoke up against his dæmon that Hotch couldn’t help but glance at the man. “JJ will be fine,” he agreed firmly. “In the interests of intra-team cooperation, please refrain from profiling your co-workers, Aureilo.” It felt oddly standard to speak to the hare as though he was his own creature, even though Hotch couldn’t imagine doing the same with Emily’s Sergio or Morgan’s Naemaria. And there it was, really. Sergio was Emily’s. Naemaria was Morgan’s, just as Eris was Rossi’s or Kailo JJ’s. Aureilo was Aureilo. He didn’t belong to anyone but himself.

And wasn’t that an uncomfortable thought?

“Fine,” huffed the hare. There was a flicker of light over the tree-line to their right, drawing attention away from the brewing confrontation. The hare snapped his attention around, standing up and almost smacking his head into Reid’s chin. “Fireworks?” he asked, swivelling his ears around to zero in on the distant _whistle-boom_. “During the day?”

Hotch smiled. Finally, something he knew that the genius and his hare didn’t. “Smoke effects,” he said, watching out of the corner of his eye as the coloured cloud dissipated over the trees, leaving trails of floating gold that shimmered oddly in the sunlight. “They use confetti and streamers too. Jack wanted them for his birthday. Expensive, though. I ended up talking him into sparklers instead.”

“In the middle of the woods?” Reid asked. “If they’re so expensive, why waste them on a show that no one is there to see?”

Hotch shrugged, even as Aureilo twitched with shock at the next loud _whistle-boom_ , almost falling off the seat. “Practise?” Reid hummed, and folded his hands over his hare’s ears, sheltering him instinctively.

They travelled the rest of the way in silence.

 

* * *

 

“What are you thinking?” Aureilo asked, his paws silent on the tiled floor of the precinct. Reid didn’t answer, not straight away, watching the huddled group of parents and dæmons in the centre of the next room through the distorted glass between them. His team was out there, doing damage control, trying to corral all the sets of parents into some semblance of order. He’d been tucked into a side room with a map and a pack of push-pins, where he and his dæmon couldn’t unsettle anyone.

“I’m thinking,” Reid said, tilting his head and scanning the wavy forms of the parents and their assortment of dæmons, “that this guy has to have some kind of control over these children. Something about him is trustworthy. Children scream. Scared children scream a lot.”

“Large vehicle: ice cream truck?” Aureilo asked, and Reid felt a bite of frustration that he was in here and not out there where he could hear the tones of the parents’ voices, see their body language. He trusted his team—they _were_ the best, but he wanted to _see_. They were just rehashing what they already knew in here.

“We’re missing something,” he said, turning his back on the window. All he was getting through it was garbled information anyway. The map stared back at him, almost accusingly. “Besides some accurate detail on the number of homeless children in the area.”

Aureilo snorted, scratching at his abdomen with a brisk hind leg. “Why count the homeless when it looks like it’s becoming a self-cleaning problem?” he said, his voice cold with sarcasm. “Who bothers about some missing eyesores? Spencer… about Jennifer.”

Reid frowned. He really didn’t need this. “No,” he said firmly, glaring at his dæmon. “Don’t do this, Aur. Don’t run roughshod over the team because you think you’ve seen something they haven’t. You’re so _cocky._ This is why Morgan is…”

“Scared of us?”

That hurt. “Of you, maybe. You’re the weird one. Why can’t you just be _normal_? If you were normal, we’d be out there doing our jobs instead of locked in here like an embarrassment.” His voice turned sharp, almost without his conscious awareness of it. He tried to reel in the bitterness, but hiding it in his tone didn’t hide it in his heart and Aureilo didn’t need to be the soul of a profiler to know the resentment Reid’s held for him.

“Oh,” the hare said, and he sounded angry except his shoulders hunched forward and his long ears folded flat, making him small and hidden. Reid shivered as a flicker of _sadhurtangrysad_ hummed through their thin link, easily ignored. “I’m not the reason we’re lonely,” Aureilo snapped, and Reid could see him shivering but to comfort him would be to admit that maybe Reid was in the wrong here, and Reid had seen the way Morgan had looked at Aureilo on the jet. He didn’t want to be looked at like that anymore.

He didn’t want to be isolated anymore.

“No. Not entirely.” He turned back to his map, turning his back on his dæmon. “But you’re not an insignificant part of it.”

He didn’t hear the hare leave, but when he looked around again, he was alone.

 

* * *

 

Even over the hollering of a gaggle of distressed parents, Rossi heard Eris’s quiet, “Uh oh.” He looked around, following the eagle owl’s keen-eyed gaze until he saw what she was looking at: the slim brown form of the kid’s dæmon heading for the exit. He hadn’t even lasted the hour. Odd. It wasn’t like him to bail so quickly in a strange town, especially when the case was still in the early stages. They needed him close, needed Reid sharp. They’d get neither with him wandering off.

“Damnit, I can’t afford to chase the beast,” he muttered, and saw Prentiss turn to look as well as she heard his curse. Her mouth thinned as the hare vanished out the low swinging flap set in the wall for dæmons, the flash of his white tail the last sign of him. Rossi could almost hear her concern ticking up a notch. After all, it was Prentiss who knew the kid best. Hadn’t it been her who’d been the only one to actually tell her what the deal was, when Rossi had joined the team and found himself facing the fount of perpetual oddness that was Dr. Spencer Reid?

> “You’ll mostly end up talking to his dæmon. You’ll get used to it.”
> 
> “Has he always been like this? Seems odd he’d have gotten a job here if he can’t be…”
> 
> “Normal? He is normal. There’s nothing the hell wrong with him. He just… if you want to know, look up Tobias Hankel. Reid didn’t recover from that. Aureilo did. So, you talk to the hare until Reid decides otherwise, and that’s how we work here. Gideon understood that. Do you?”

And here he was, watching the dæmon leave the building, leaving the man alone. It was almost unnatural. It was certainly unusual. Rossi had always loved the unusual.

Maybe he should send JJ in there… Team Mom to the rescue. A quick glance around showed JJ with her hand on a woman’s arm, guiding her to a chair. Her dæmon danced around her head, his wings manic in a way that screamed _I am distressed_.

No help there. Hotch was sequestered in the room with the sour-faced, sour-assed sheriff of this spit of a town. Prentiss was separating the parents into groups and finding them rooms so the team could interview them. Morgan was quietly expressing his displeasure with the lack of information on the local homeless in such a way that the man he was expressing his displeasure at didn’t appear to even have noticed how angry the profiler really was. Fantastic. David Rossi to the rescue again. In the year he’d been here, he could count on one hand the amount of times he’d actually had a face-to-face conversation with the kid.

But never let it be said that he backed down from a challenge.

“How’s the geographical profile?” he asked, sticking his head into the room before sidling in without waiting for a further invitation. Eris rattled with irritation as her feathers caught on the door, talons biting into his shoulder as she gripped down.

“Limited,” Reid said, staring at the map like he could see straight through it. Already, Rossi could see the vague emptiness that came when the dæmon was away from the man and getting further, although that could also be Rossi himself projecting. Who was he to say whether or not the man was sharp with or without his dæmon? At his worst, Reid was still the smartest brain in the room. “We need more information.”

“More missing kids you mean,” Rossi said, warily bumping his heel against the door to ensure it was shut tight and soundproofed. That kind of callous comment wasn’t a Reid comment. That was more an Aureilo comment, and it sounded odd coming from the kinder man instead of the brusquer dæmon. “Odd thing to hope for.”

Reid blinked, then looked horrified. “Oh no, I didn’t, I don’t… I don’t want…” He trailed off, his ears turning red under the mop of ridiculous hair on his head. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I was distracted.”

Obviously.

“Wanna tell me where ol’ lop ears is going?” Rossi asked, doing his best Hotch impersonation. Maybe he could glare the kid into trusting him. Reid tilted his head, as though listening.

Rossi tried not to shiver.

“Not far,” Reid said finally. “He’s just outside. We… disagreed. On the case.”

He looked away, guilty as the proverbial kid in the cookie jar. _Case my ass,_ Rossi thought darkly. “Bullshit,” he said out loud. Reid’s eyes widened, trapped. Good. Maybe the kid just needed a little reminder that he wasn’t the only one on the team, and the rest of them needed to know when things were about to go to shit. “What is it actually?”

Reid looked from Rossi to his dæmon, and then actually opened his mouth as though to say something. There was a resigned cast to his face. He was going to talk. Thank fucking finally. Rossi wasn’t Hotch. He wasn’t content to wait with his thumbs up his ass for the kid to work shit out on his own, but then Reid’s mouth snapped shut, his eyes locked on the glass behind Rossi’s shoulders and the guilt returned, twice as strong. Well, Rossi thought, at least he’d have a fair idea who the kid was actually talking about, since no one looked quite that guilty unless the person they’d somehow betrayed was right there.

He turned as JJ opened the door and stuck her head in, her face pale. “Northside Hospital just contacted one of the deputies,” she said, eyes flickering between them both curiously. “He just shouted it out for the whole station to hear, including the parents. They’ve just had a bunch of unattended children rock up on their doorstep.”

“That’s good right?” Reid babbled, pale and nervous and bouncing on the balls of his heels. “They’re alive? They’re okay?”

JJ swallowed. “They only have three.”

Well, shit.


	3. Bah, Bah, a black Sheep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bah, Bah, a black Sheep,
> 
> Have you any Wool?
> 
> Yes merry have I,
> 
> Three Bags full,
> 
> One for my Master,
> 
> One for my Dame,
> 
> But none for the little Boy
> 
> Who cries in the Lane.

Utter fucking chaos now reigned. Rossi followed JJ out into the main room, hearing Eris groan in his ear at the cacophony of human and dæmon voices all raised in a panic. It was bordering on bedlam: Hotch was barely visible through the throng, hands held up in what would have been a calming manner were the situation less frenzied; Morgan was trying to stop the mass exodus towards the door; Prentiss could just be seen peering out of a doorway, eyes large and looking to Hotch for guidance.  

“Oh boy,” Reid said quietly behind him. “If Hotch doesn’t get them to calm down, the hospital is going to have a disaster on their hands.”

“Holler at them?” Eris suggested, and Rossi snorted at the mental image of Hotch’s disapproval if he did _that_.

“You can’t stop us going!” a man snarled at Morgan, his snow leopard dæmon baring glistening fangs and feinting at the calm Naemaria blocking her path. The dog didn’t even flinch, staring the cat down coolly. Rossi’s money was on Naemaria. The leopard was all floof.

“Where are the other children?” a woman was calling out to no one in particular, looking around desperately for someone to answer her question. Her eyes landed on Rossi and she started towards him before her arm was caught by another woman, pulling her back and eyeing the agents suspiciously. “Where are they? Why aren’t they all back?”

“Why aren’t you _doing anything_?” three other voices chorused. Hotch looked about, his brow furrowed. To anyone else, he looked calm. To any of his team, they could see the ‘We need to stop this now’ written across the very slight twist to his mouth. Nothing he was saying was having any difference.

“We’re in contact with the hospital—” That was JJ, Kailo hidden in her collar where he was safe from the ugly atmosphere.

“If you’ll just take a seat—” Emily. Going for soothing. Mistake. The man she’d picked didn’t want to be soothed, and his badger dæmon bailed Sergio up against the wall, looming over the spitting cat. Rossi swore and started towards them, Eris opening her wings ready to glide down there and try to defuse the situation. Probably with her talons, which really wasn’t defusing, but there was something so horrifying about the wide digging claws of the badger so close to Emily’s cat that he didn’t actually care if Eris did poke a hole or two in the badger’s snout.

But then: “Quiet!” came a roar loud enough to cut through the noise and instant silence dropped on them like a blanket. All eyes turned, Rossi’s included. “We will have quiet!” Rossi blinked once, and then blinked again because _holy shit_.

Hal bristled from where she’d leapt up onto the desk, scattering papers under her great paws, easily looming over every person in the room from her lofty position. This only served to make it more chilling when the massive wolf lowered her head, dark eyes glittering in a way that had every prey dæmon scampering to hide, and swept her gaze over the assembled crowd. Even Rossi felt something in his spine shrivel at the sight; like he’d very much like to not be under that predatory eye anymore, thank you very much.

Hotch stepped forward without even glancing at his dæmon, like what she was doing was completely normal in every possible way. “Please,” he said, his ‘listen to me’ voice hardly any less intimidating then his dæmon’s roar had been. “We are working to identify the recovered children as quickly as possible, but we require everyone’s cooperation in order to do so. We don’t know the children’s condition yet, we don’t know if they can help us; we need descriptions: physical descriptions, the clothes they were wearing when they went missing, their dæmons’ favoured forms; anything that can help us bring them home as fast as we can. My agents are en-route to the hospital—once they know anything, they will let us know, but until then panic is only hindering the investigation and the treatment of the children if everyone arrives there at once.”

Silence. Rossi almost laughed at the stunned expressions on the faces of everyone in the room. Most eyes were still locked onto Hal, even as she stepped down onto the ground once more, a visible circle of space appearing around her as people backpedalled nervously away.

“She’s been hanging around Aureilo too much,” Eris commented. Rossi shoved back a grin before it could betray him, the tension dissipating as people began to murmur softly amongst one another instead of shouting. Sergio slipped out from under the badger, bouncing up easily into Emily’s arms and twining around her neck, his tail flicking. Morgan was staring at Hal, something akin to dismay on his face. Rossi filed _that_ away for future reference.

“Stay,” he instructed Reid, who looked only too relieved to be given the option, melding back against the wall and trying to look inconspicuous. He wove through the group with people clearing a reluctant path for him, walking up to Hotch and shaking his head even as JJ and Emily began damage control. “And they say I’m the dramatic one,” he said, tilting his chin towards Hal. “What was that?”

“Crowd control,” Hotch replied, glancing down at her. “Her version of it anyway. We need people at the hospital, now. We need to know who those kids are, and aren’t, before this gets even more out of hand.”

Rossi nodded again, thinking. “You’re staying here?” He didn’t even need Hotch to give an affirmative on that one, the man would never leave his team in such an unpredictable atmosphere. “I’ll stay as well. We can work through them systematically—they’re not going to try and bully me into anything.”

Hotch was already shaking his head. “No. I want you with Morgan. There’s an underground water treatment system where homeless children are living, according to the sheriff. I’d send Reid, but he and Morgan are… tense at the moment. And you’re more flexible; that may be useful.”

“Sending JJ and Prentiss to the hospital?” It was a smart move. They didn’t know anything about the kids’ condition yet, if sexual assault was a factor… “Let Reid help you with the parents. He’s non-threatening, he’s empathetic. He’ll get through to them in ways you won’t, not after that stunt Hal just pulled.”

“Okay.” Hotch scanned the room, eyes settling on Reid crouched to talk to a younger sibling that had approached him. The girl had her thumb in her mouth and her other hand gripping the woolly coat of a lamb at her side, and her attention was wholly focused on the young agent. “Keep in contact. I have a feeling this is going to get uglier before the end.”

“Doesn’t it always?” Rossi agreed, turning towards the exit. “Why should this one be any different?”

 

* * *

 

Sergio kept up a steady stream of complaining the entire way to the hospital, ranging from his fur smelling like worms to the sheer indignity of being bailed up by a _badger_ of all things.

“They can’t even jump,” he yowled from the backseat where Emily had tossed him after he’d shown his displeasure by putting his claws through her slacks. “They’re grounded. Grounded! And there I was, alone, forgotten, breathed on by that smelly ground-dwelling _beast_.”

“Serge, shh,” Emily said finally, as the car drew up outside the hospital, JJ breathing out slowly as she put it into park and stared at the looming entrance where people and dæmons bustled about with their faces taut and distracted. It was the only noise she’d made the entire trip, even when Emily had tried to ask her about the case.

“Don’t you ever stop complaining?” muttered Aureilo from his perch next to Sergio in the back. The hare looked grumpy. He’d hopped up into the SUV as soon as Emily had opened the door, glaring at them wordlessly as though daring them to tell him he couldn’t come. They hadn’t argued, although JJ had bit at her lip like she was _going_ to say something that she’d barely held back. And that was another problem they were probably going to have to deal with at some point, this growing rift between Reid and his dæmon. Emily wisely decided to shelve it for now. Besides, it was the next best thing to having Reid by their side for their next task.

“Do you have the file?” JJ said quietly, her eyes downcast. Kailo waved a leg out from her collar, before delving back in and vanishing, his yellow wings hidden by the shadow of her shirt. Emily pulled it out from where she’d tucked it safely between the chair and the centre console, flipping it open and scanning the pictures of the missing children. Five kids. Five dæmons. All smiling, all happy.

Only three found.

“Yeah,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt and opening the door. There was a scuffle as Aureilo and Sergio both bounded for the door at the same time, leaping over her lap in a blur of black and tan and bickering as they went. “We’re to meet a Dr. DeVere in paediatrics. JJ? You okay?”

A bright smile that fooled neither of them flashed back at her as JJ overcompensated. “As fine as can be when we’re about to break the hearts of two families,” she replied, and vanished from the car at speed. Emily caught up to her as she strode towards the hospital, shoulders set determinedly. Sergio and Aureilo weaved around their legs, still arguing in muted voices.

“And bring three children home to their families,” she said, watching JJ’s face cloud. “Come on, we have to take the good where we can get it with this job. You know that.”

JJ opened her mouth to speak, before closing it quickly. “Uh oh,” she said finally, quickening her stride. “That doesn’t look good.”

Emily looked around, spotting the nurse walking towards them quickly, dressed in scrubs and a grim expression. His dæmon hovered by the front door, glancing back into the building, with a  harried expression. “Agents Prentiss and Jareau?” the man asked, receiving an affirmative nod from them both. Sergio and Aureilo stilled, staring at the man warily. “I was sent to collect you. The children have been moved.”

“Where to?” JJ asked. Emily waited, her heart sinking. She wasn’t sure they were going to like the answer. “And why?”

“Daimoniatrics Intensive Care Unit,” he said, and JJ went pale. Sergio slunk to the ground, his ears back and eyes locked on Aureilo who looked… frozen. Terrified. “We’re trying to stabilize them but… they’ve been Intercised, Agents. Their dæmons are gone.”

 

* * *

 

Rossi was right. The parents drew back from him now, their eyes on Hal. The wolfdog didn’t seem sorry. On the contrary, Hotch was getting a distinctively pleased vibe from her, despite her outwardly expressionless demeanour. If this was a taste of how Reid felt when Aureilo did something ‘Aureilo-ish’, Hotch had a sudden very distinct insight into the man. It wasn’t one he was particularly enjoying, especially when it was impeding his ability to do his job. Fortunately, Rossi was right in more than one aspect.

“Kayla would never go with a stranger,” a mother with a miserable looking stout on her shoulder was telling Reid, her hands shaking on the table. He laid one of his own hands over hers, squeezing slightly, and she leaned into the comforting touch. “I just don’t understand, Agent, why would someone take my daughter? Her father is gone, she’s all I have…”

“That’s what we’re here to find out, Ms. Chant,” Reid murmured, using his free hand to slide photos across the desk. “These are the clothes she was wearing when she was taken?”

A nod. Hotch watched through the glass as she pointed to each item, describing it, and then moving on to talk about the day her daughter had gone missing. Reid led her easily into the interview, his eyes so painfully earnest that even Hotch felt drawn in.

Hal shifted, her claws clicking on the linoleum. “Why did you draw such attention to yourself?” Hotch asked her, now that they were alone. “They don’t trust us now.”

“They didn’t trust us before,” she said calmly. “We’re strangers telling them that someone they trust has likely taken their children out from under their very noses. And you know what people think when they think of kidnappers and thieves in the night: predatory. The old stereotypes are strong.” She wasn’t wrong. Wolves and jackals, coyotes and cougars. Nocturnal predators that snatched unattended young for a low-risk meal. Hotch faced it every time they had a child abduction case, the side-glances and the wary eyes on Hal, just the same as people looked at JJ and her butterfly and scoffed at her ability to do her job, or wondered how well Prentiss could work in a team with the solitude of a cat at her heart.

The door clicked open, the sheriff stepping in. “Getting much from her?” he asked, looking through the glass. His eyes lingered on Reid, his face inscrutable. “We’ve got squat from the others. No one saw anything. No one knows anything. And so far as strangers in town goes; all the travellers we’ve interviewed have alibis.”

“We said it could be a local,” Hotch said, watching the man carefully as his gaze darted about the room around Reid’s feet. He knew what the man was looking for and failing to find. “In fact, it’s almost certainly a local. An outsider would draw attention, and this man hasn’t even raised eyebrows.”

“Ay,” the sheriff said finally. His mink dæmon sneered, her small fangs glinting. “Your man… where’s his rabbit?”

“Hare,” Hotch corrected automatically, almost hearing the scoff Aureilo would have made at ‘rabbit’. “Dr. Reid has the ability to separate from his dæmon. Aureilo is assisting the rest of my team with enquiries elsewhere.”

The sheriff looked troubled. “Ah. That’s a… unnerving ability. And perhaps one you would do better to hide for the meantime.”

Hal didn’t move, but Hotch felt the spark of interest as she latched onto that statement, the fur on her neck lifting very slightly. “I’m sorry?” he asked, turning his stare fully onto the man.

He wasn’t cowed, although his mink slipped behind his legs and peered out from between them. “Hospital called. Said your agents were there, speaking with the children. Said it’s not gonna make a lick of difference.” He carded his fingers through his hair, almost uncomfortable. There was a look on his face that Hotch recognised: a kind of sickened misery that only came with the worst cases. “The kids… the kids have had their dæmons stolen. Somehow.”

His first instinct was to declare it as impossible.

Then he turned and looked at Reid; at the empty space by his heels that quietly proclaimed _nothing is impossible_. The memories of Reid after Hankel, his bond with Aureilo broken and barely reforged in time, the horror they’d felt upon reaching that cornfield and realizing Hankel had taken the man but not the dæmon.

Not impossible at all.

“We don’t tell the parents yet,” he heard himself saying, eyes locked on Reid and the woman talking about the little girl, little Kayla, and her love of drawing. “Not until we have positive identifications.”

The sheriff laughed coldly, the noise wavering as his voice shook. “No shit. We’ve got five families out there thinking this nightmare is over for three of them. How the heck do we tell them that the two who haven’t been found are the lucky ones? You don’t fix having your dæmon taken. You don’t. Those kids are dead, they just haven’t laid down yet.”

Normally, Hotch would have gently rebuked him for this cold statement, but right now he couldn’t look away from Reid—Reid alive, Reid okay, Reid _sane_ —and the proof that you _could_ come back from this. That you could dance on the edge of nothing and still be hauled back to safety. And right now, facing this, he ne needed to believe that they could.

 

* * *

 

JJ stood on the edge of a nightmare she thought she’d never have to relive, and there was no reprieve on the horizon for any of them.

“You should stay in the car,” Emily had murmured to Aureilo as they’d stepped through the ominously swinging doors of the DICU and the hare had faltered, trembled, stopped. “You don’t need to be here.”

JJ looked around, at the cheerfully coloured walls with their neat sky-blue wash and the happily gambolling dæmons scampering around with crooked painted grins, and felt ill. Beyond ill. It was a nausea that crossed into a physical pain, a clawing at her gut that had her thinking of Henry and Filimay and Kailo and Reid and Aureilo and…

She drew a sharp breath, and Emily looked at her. Profiling. Sergio was pressed so tightly against Aureilo’s side it was hard to tell where cat ended and hare began. There was a strange habit of hospitals to try and ‘happy’ up the DICU. It was like by painting the walls and having the nurses wear colourful buttons, it was hiding the fact that out of every ward in the hospital, the DICU was where people invariably went to die.

Damage to a human? Fixable. Easy. Sometimes complicated, but if you died from an injury or an illness, medical science could almost always explain what went wrong.

Damage to a dæmon? Damned if we know. Maybe this will work, maybe it won’t. Most likely it won’t. Put them in a ward away from everyone, where people won’t have to watch them wither away, where people won’t have to watch their destruction. Or their madness or their pain…

Spence had been in a ward just like this.

“Spence survived,” Kailo whispered, crawling up her neck under the curtain of her hair and touching delicate feet to her ear. “He got better. _Aureilo_ came back. They might too.”

“Where are they?” JJ asked, and the nurse bit at his lip and led them along more tightly winding corridors of happy animals and closed doors and no windows into the sealed rooms until…

“Agents,” the doctor greeted them, his sharply hooked face expressionless. JJ looked down at his dæmon out of habit. A blank-faced maned wolf looked back, tall and slender and wiry. “Nurse Cauld warned you of what to expect?”

“He told us they’d been Intercised,” Emily said, and JJ saw Aureilo shudder, his eyes darting around the corridor. “I thought… I didn’t think it was possible anymore.”

The doctor laid a hand on the door handle. “It’s not. At least, we didn’t think it was. We thought the art had been lost centuries ago, along with witchcraft and alethiometers. Apparently, unfortunately, we were wrong. These children have most certainly suffered Intercision, not Severing. The separation is clean and complete. I must recommend that your dæmons remain in the viewing room if you enter the ward. The children will become… distressed… at the sight of them.” With this, he opened the door and they followed him in, silent and wary. The room they entered was small, a bank of seats to one side and a desk lining a one-way mirror on the other. It was dark. Blinds were pulled, blocking their view of what was on the other side. JJ swallowed hard, glancing down at the dæmons at their feet.

Words weren’t needed. Their dæmons quietly filed against the wall, Sergio and Aureilo still pressed together. Kailo slipped further into her collar, invisible. She wasn’t going to have him fly down there and draw attention to the extra dæmon they had in their midst. The maned wolf settled down, leaning lankily against the armrest of a chair and yawning.

“This will be distressing,” Dr. DeVere said, hovering his hand on the button to open the blind. “I will warn you of that.” JJ gripped the file tightly, feeling it slip between her sweat-damp palms. Would the child be behind these blinds? The girl, Kayla, with her blonde hair and Henry’s blue eyes and her butterfly dæmon… she felt shame for hoping that she wasn’t. For hoping that it was another innocent revealed. What kind of a person did that make her?

It was Emily who spoke first, and she didn’t look at Aureilo while she did so. “We know. We’ve seen it before.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I doubt that.”

The blind opened.

 

* * *

 

Emily sounded as upset as Morgan had ever heard her when she called. That, more than anything, was a sign of just how quickly this case had gone to shit. Morgan hung up, feeling Rossi’s eyes boring into the side of his head. “They identified one of the kids,” he settled for saying, hearing Naemaria whine at the feedback of his emotions: shock and horror and a whole range of just… anger. Anger at everything.

Who could do something like this? Who _would_?

“Only one?’ Rossi asked, his voice sharp.

Morgan nodded, glancing out the window of the parked car to the gently sloping ridge leading down to the tunnel system the cops had told them about. From a tree, he could see a flicker of movement. Something was watching them. “Yeah. Albert Plume. Eight. The other two weren’t in the system, Rossi. They’re not even listed as missing.”

There was silence for a second, then Rossi swore. Loudly. There was a tiny bit of something comforting in the other man’s anger; at least Morgan wasn’t alone in his confusion about why people did the awful things they did. “Reid was right, wasn’t he?” Rossi finally asked, kneading his knuckles into his forehead like a headache threatened him. “Homeless population?”

“Looks like. We’ve got a six-year-old girl, not in any system that we can find, and a seventeen-year-old, same deal. She’s a ghost.” Morgan wondered how to, somehow, find the words to describe the rest of the call.

Rossi blinked. Eris made a started _kiiiyik_ noise in the back. “Wait, seventeen? What? That’s not our MO.” He wasn’t the only one confused over that.

“Rossi.” They could revisit the outlier in a minute. Morgan kept staring at the tree as he spoke, watching for the flicker of movement. There. Again. Something small… he caught a flash of spots against the dappled brown, gone in an instant. These kids had a sentry. That was paranoid. That was… fear. What did they fear? “The unsub is intercising them.”

“Ah. Well. That... change the profile quite horrifically. Do the parents know yet?”

“JJ is calling Hotch now with the identifications, and getting more info faxed through to Garcia. Hotch will notify the Plumes and get them to the hospital. Probably just in time to…” He trailed off.

_Watch them die?_

_Reid didn’t._

“Reid?”

“Huh?” It was eerie, hearing his thoughts suddenly mirrored out loud, although he knew that Reid was probably first on all of their minds at this revelation. He swallowed, and avoided the question deftly. Or not so deftly. Point was, he avoided the question. “So we’ve got some sick freak ripping away kids’ dæmons. He’s shown an age preference, and then gone right out of his comfort zone and taken a teenager. He’s gotta be educated, probably internationally, because no college here offers anything near what would give him the knowledge to perform an Intercision without killing the kid flat out. Christ, I don’t think _anyone_ has that information.”

Rossi hummed. “Well, we know at least one person who does.”

 

* * *

 

“That’s not possible.”

Reid stood behind Hotch as he told the two parents, two normal, middle-class, ordinary parents, that the unthinkable had happened.

“I’m sorry,” Hotch was saying soothingly, Hal by his side. The parents’ dæmons paced, they hissed, they danced on the edge of panic. Reid just watched and tried not to _remember_. “But it appears as though your son’s dæmon has been Intercised.”

“It’s a myth,” the father declared loudly, looking from Hotch to Reid as though one of them would laugh and shout _gotcha!_ As though this was a nightmare that could end. Reid _felt_ like laughing. He felt like hysterically laughing; the one person in the room, in the goddamn _country_ , who could actually tell them just how horribly possible and completely unfixable it was. “Intercision doesn’t exist. It’s just a scary story people tell their kids to get them to behave.”

“We used to tell Albie about the Snatchers coming to get him,” the mother whimpered. Reid looked at her, knowing his face was blank, knowing it was probably scaring her more, but completely unsure of how to regain control of his muscles. “To make him go to sleep without getting up all the time.” He wanted Aureilo in that moment, more than anything. The distance between them _ached_.

“I’m sorry,” Hotch was saying again, but Reid wasn’t listening anymore, his ears were buzzing, and somehow, someone, had found something they shouldn’t have. How? The technology… it didn’t exist anymore. It hadn’t existed for centuries, not since the Magisterium was disbanded…

The buzzing was broken by everything suddenly getting very loud again, the father’s wolverine dæmon bounding up to him with his teeth bared and hackles upright. “Where’s your dæmon?” it barked, twisting on the spot to peer up at him. “Why en’t you got a dæmon? You’re still alive? You’re still right? So our Albie is fine! We can fix him—him and Widget!”

Reid stared at the wolverine, then looked up to find the two parents staring at him hopefully. “I was Severed from my dæmon,” he said finally, seeing Hotch blanch at this casual acknowledgement. Among the team, there was an unspoken rule that they _didn’t_ talk about it. Not ever. And he’d just broken that rule and was going to continue breaking it. “Not Intercised. They can treat Severings, if it doesn’t outright kill the patient.”

“But Intercision is just the same, right?” the father asked, his eyes wide and broken. “They fixed you, yeah? There’s treatments!” He was stalling. They all were. None of them wanted to drive to that hospital and see, especially not Reid, especially not Hotch.

_Especially_ not Hotch. He’d seen it before. At least Reid had the somewhat dubious luck of not remembering anything past the moment Hankel had fractured his skull with the butt of his pump-action. “No,” Reid said quietly, and Hotch stared at him like he’d turned into a stranger. “It’s not the same. They didn’t fix me. And they can’t fix him.” He turned and walked out and left them there. _Aureilo_ , he thought miserably, but his dæmon wasn’t there, and he never would be again. Not the same as he had been… and now someone had found out how to do what had been done to him by accident, on purpose.

There was no fucking way he was letting them get away with it.


	4. Rock-A-Bye-Baby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catch him, crow! Carry him, kite!
> 
> Take him away till the apples are ripe;
> 
> When they are ripe and ready to fall,
> 
> Here comes baby, apples and all.

Reid’s words played on his mind the entire drive to the hospital. Over and over, endlessly. _They didn’t fix me._ They followed him up the hall as he strode towards the DICU, Hal at his heels. The parents walked behind him, huddled together with their dæmons silent. They haunted him when the doctor quietly began explaining just what exactly had befallen their son. And finally, _finally_ , they relented, as his attention was taken up completely by the scene that met him as they stepped into the small, cheerfully painted room with the single, occupied bed in the centre.

“Albie,” murmured the mom, stepping forward twice. Hotch watched her. He determinedly did not think of Jack.

“He’s one of the quiet ones,” the doctor said softly to Hotch, and Hotch thought numbly that quiet was one way to describe it. The boy was laying in the bed staring sightlessly at the ceiling; the only proof he lived still was the slow beep of the monitor attached to his chest. His skin pallid and lips tinged blue, he was a ghost hauled back from death’s door with one foot still firmly on the stoop.

He didn’t react to his mother when she called his name.

He didn’t react when his father touched his arm and started crying.

He just didn’t react.

Hotch had seen enough. He turned and walked out, and as soon as the door clicked shut behind him, Hal was pressed against his leg and shuddering like she’d used to when they were little and shaken by nightmares. He held his hand against her ears, pressing down on her fur and smoothing it flat to try and hide the shake of his hands in the caress. The doctor broke his fixed concentration: “Agent Hotchner? Your other agents are this way.”

Following the doctor, they found out exactly what he’d meant by ‘quiet ones’.

“I thought you said there was only three?” he asked, staring through the window into the room. Emily sat in there, cross-legged and patient, her eyes tracking the girl who paced in front of her, screaming, screaming, and grasping a ragged doll close like she couldn’t remember how to let it go. Hal and Sergio sat behind Hotch in the room that looked onto this sight, Aureilo sandwiched silently between them.

Behind Emily in that terrible room, another girl crouched, pressing her hands to her ears and rocking with wide, empty eyes. The hospital gown she was wearing swayed with the movement, her feet bare on the cold floor. Hotch could see signs of malnutrition in the stringiness of her hair and the bow to her legs, just as clearly as he could see shades of the girl she’d used to be in the dull colours of the frayed wool bracelet twisted around her wrist. There was another child in the corner seat, a bruised boy in torn clothes, and he was just like Albert except for the way his grubby hands clung to the pillow he was clutching. And there was still the teenager, in another room. Where had the other boy come from?

“They found him hiding under a parked car,” the doctor said, tilting his chin towards the extra boy. “We almost had to sedate him to get him in here. He was… he’d found a dead bird.” He trailed off. “He can speak. The others can’t, or won’t.”

The door clicked and Emily stepped out, a thin sheen on sweat on her forehead and the skin pinched tight around her mouth. “Nothing from the youngest but screaming,” she said, looking at Hotch. As soon as the door closed behind her, Sergio flung himself into her arms and she hugged him close, the cat allowing it without a protest. “The other girl is completely out of it.”

“The boy?” Hotch said when he’d found his voice and shoved away memories and thoughts that he didn’t have time for until this case was over. Reid had screamed at first.

“He’s…” She stopped, and swallowed. “I don’t think he should be in the same room as the others. The girls were less… they weren’t as distressed until he was brought in.”

“Signs of sexual assault on any of them?” Hotch asked, because the boy’s lips were moving, over and over like he was chanting, and he didn’t want to send Emily back in there while she was looking almost rattled. Which for her was a scream of ‘this is the line that will break me if I cross it.’ The last time he’d ignored that line, it had cost him Elle, and then Gideon in short succession.

“Just the teenager,” the doctor said after a moment. “We haven’t been able to examine the boy. If you’re going in there, please…”

“I know,” Hotch said, nodding at Hal. She flattened her ears, unhappy, and he slowly, so slowly, walked to the door alone. In the room, the girl kept screaming but paid him no mind. The other girl kept rocking, her eyes twitching towards him and away and back and away again, a metronome of shattered attention. The nurse soothed them both, and Hotch knew that they didn’t want to sedate them because he knew from painfully vivid memories that a lot of the time the dæmonless just never woke up from sedation. They had refused to sedate Reid as well.

Hotch kneeled, making himself smaller, and the boy looked at him. Actually looked at him, not through him like Albert had, and it was like staring into a void. His hair was blonde. There was a cut on his lip that matched the bruise on his chin, and both were caused by a hand far bigger than his own. Hotch wondered how old he was. He wondered if he’d ever been given a birthday. He felt Hal’s distress and ignored it.

“They took Aisling,” the boy said first, staring at him, unblinking. “They took her. I want her back. Give her back.” He let go of the pillow, reaching towards Hotch and then snapping them back to hug it close. “I know she’s here. I had her before.”

“That was a bird,” said a voice behind them, the nurse. “It was a bird, lad, just a dead bird. It wasn’t your Aisling.”

“It was,” the boy murmured, lowering his voice like he was telling Hotch a secret. “I know it was. They’re lying. They’re lying to me…”

Reid had said all this as well. _They’re lying, Hotch,_ with those same shattered-glass eyes. _They’re hiding him from me. You have to stop them._

“What’s your name?” Hotch asked, pushing the memory away again. They could search his dæmon’s name, but if she was unsettled it might not show up on any database. Some parents didn’t register their children’s dæmons until they were settled. Haley hadn’t registered Arelys. Hotch had, because he’d found too many children too traumatized to do much more than scream for their dæmons to not.

“He’s wrong,” the boy said. His nails dragged against the pillow. They needed cutting. “He’s wrong. She is perfect. Aisling is perfect she is, he’s wrong.”

“I know she is,” Hotch said, softly, soothingly. Just like he was talking to Jack. _No. Not like Jack, never like Jack._ “What’s your name though? What does Aisling call you?”

“He took her away. He said she was dirty. He cut us in two and he took her away. We weren’t right. She made me dirty and he wanted to make me clean, but she’s perfect. Why did you take her?”

“That’s all you’ll get from him, Agent,” the nurse said, and Hotch wanted to tell him to leave them, to stop _giving up_ , because Reid was wrong. This could be fixed. They just had to find Aisling and bring her back, and they could fix it just like they fixed him.

Reid was wrong. This could be fixed.

_They’ve taken my Aureilo,_ Reid had sobbed, curled into a ball in the corner of the room with his shoulders hunched up like he was the hare missing his human. _I can’t find him. I’ll die. I want to die._

“I’m just like them now,” the boy said, his eyes huge and ghost-grey and vacant. “Just like the empties. He’ll get us all. He’ll get us all.”

_Please let me die._

Hotch stayed until he couldn’t stay any longer, and when he walked out, Aureilo was gone.

 

* * *

 

If Morgan didn’t know better, he would have bet money that the water treatment tunnels were empty of everything but rats and water. He knew better though. Naemaria cast over the ground with her nose as they carefully picked their way down the slope towards the opening to the tunnels, a gaping wound in the grassy hill made of brickwork and rusted metal. Morgan didn’t envy her. Even he could smell the dank rot of the tepid water surrounding them and the familiar acrid bite of human waste along with it.

“They’re not in use anymore,” Rossi said, eyeing the opening with a line of distaste around his mouth. Probably worrying about his shoes. “Council’s been considering knocking them down for years, never got around to it. Apparently, there’s a horde of kids here with nowhere else to go. They round them up sometimes, ship them off to social services. Most end up back here.”

Naemaria growled, unhappiness evident in her voice. Morgan understood that unhappiness.  They had nowhere else to go because, while they were here, they were nicely out of the way. Somewhere to chase the little beggars and panhandlers so tourists didn’t catch sight of them. Somewhere for the older kids to play tricks for a dollar or a meal. Somewhere forgotten, just like they were.

“How old did Reid say they were on average?” Morgan said bitterly, his foot slipping on something slimy as the ground evened out under them. He glanced to the tree. It looked empty, but he knew better. A bird called, the noise sharp and distinctly not native. A warning. The kids in the tunnel would be scattering like ants under an overturned rock. “Six?”

“Yup,” Rossi said, turning his head to murmur something to Eris. “We’re not going to get within a hundred feet of them. Not a chance. I get the feeling our friends here might be well used to being preyed upon.”

“All the more reason we need to speak to them,” Naemaria whispered, inching closer to Morgan so only he could hear her. “They might know more than the town children. I don’t think these children could be coaxed away with a sweet or a sympathetic word.”

“A hot meal maybe,” Morgan replied, glancing to the woods again. Silence. Not even birds called. They weren’t alone.

“Well,” Rossi said, holding his arm out as Eris shuffled down it; all the better for her to spread her great wings in preparation to take off. “Guess we gotta be a little more inventive then. What would Reid do in this situation?”

Morgan stared at him. He realized what the man meant to do moments before he actually did it, horror sinking through his gut like a stone. “Rossi you can’t,” he snapped. “It’s not… right, man. It’s not right. You’ll freak them out more.” Naemaria shrunk back. Eris twisted her head around to stare at them, her orange eyes in that moment uncannily like the hare’s she was emulating.

“They won’t speak to a human,” she said crossly, blinking one eye and then the other. “But what threat am I? Were I you, I would send Naemaria as well. Not even hungry children can resist the allure of a friendly dog.” And, with that, she swept off into the tunnels, Rossi following at the most sedate pace his extended range with her would allow. Nowhere near the distance Reid and Aureilo could reach, but further than any of the rest of the team. The benefits of a winged form. Morgan sometimes suspected Hal could move further away from Hotch than he let on, but Hotch was the kind of man to keep himself close. Rossi vanished into the tunnels without a backwards glance, but Morgan’s feet remained rooted to the ground with dismay, ever so slightly suspicious that this was a test.

“It’s not the same,” Naemaria said suddenly, sitting upright and looking at him accusingly. “It’s not the same at all and you should stop comparing it. They’re nothing alike.”

“Nothing good comes of letting your dæmon speak for you,” Morgan responded, walking hesitantly towards the opening. Despite his reservations, he couldn’t let his partner get out of sight. They were supposed to have each other’s backs. “You know that.”

Naemaria’s sigh was loud enough to carry as she padded after him, head low. “Aureilo isn’t Carmody,” she muttered. “And Spencer isn’t Buford. You’re being stupid.”

“Maybe,” Morgan agreed. “But if it was right, it wouldn’t have taken him being Severed for them to act like this.”

To that, she had no answer.

 

* * *

 

Emily went to talk to Albert. His parents sat outside, heads bowed close together, clinging to each other in their grief.

“Would one of you like to come in with me?” she asked them, pausing at the door. Sergio unhappily found a seat by himself, as close to the door as he could get without being visible when it opened.

Mrs. Plume shook her head. “I can’t,” she whispered, and dropped her head into her hands, her shoulders shaking. Mr. Plume just looked away and said nothing. Their dæmons watched, mute in their shared grief. Emily nodded at them with her heart in her mouth and stepped in. The blinds were pulled, the room cast into shadows, and Albert was still staring at the roof. Unmoved. Unchanged. Someone had taken the heart monitor off him. A nurse appeared from where she’d been bustling about in the bathroom. Emily glanced quizzically at the monitor.

“He started getting upset by the noise, poor dear,” the nurse said by way of explanation. “We didn’t want him to start… well, you’ve seen the others. He’s not straining his body like this at the very least. We can’t even _get_ the other children onto monitors. They’re all absolutely terrified of machines. Makes you wonder…” She trailed off, shivered, and left, leaving Emily alone.

Well, not completely alone.

“Albert?” she called softly, pulling the chair up. She didn’t like her chances. Even the screaming was better than this.

Almost.

“My name is Emily. I’m with the FBI.” She stopped, feeling awkward. It had been like this with Reid as well. The others had yammered away like it was normal while he sat there and stared hollowly at them. She’d found herself standing there without any idea of what to say, the silence oppressive, looking from Reid to the stagnant form of Aureilo and hardly recognising either of them. The door opened. She turned to find Mr. Plume hesitantly edging in, holding the door open for…

“You can’t be in here,” she told Aureilo quietly, but the hare ignored her. Mr. Plume stared at the hare, and there was something almost like hope on his face. Emily stood and Aureilo took her place, hopping up onto the chair and peering at the boy.

Albert didn’t move.

“Your teammate,” Mr. Plume said, still staring at Aureilo. “He moves away from his dæmon and he’s fine. More than fine—he’s some kind of genius, yeah? So if we find Widget, they can put her back and Albert might wake up proper?”

“I don’t know,” Emily answered, turning her back on the bed and Aureilo, because she didn’t. None of them did. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes things just… happened in just the right way and they reconnected.

Somehow, she doubted this one had a happy ending.

Mr. Plume was flushing red, but not from anger. There was a desperate gleam to his eyes, and he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He stuttered, stopped, tried twice. “Okay… well... um. Do you know? Uh… hare? Dæmon?”

“Aureilo,” Emily said, and she didn’t look at the hare, because if he picked now to say nothing…

“No,” Aureilo said finally, after a painfully long pause. “Intercision is different, Mr. Plume. It’s complete. It’s not like healing a broken bone. It’s more like trying to reattach an amputated limb, after the wound has healed. It can’t be done. I’m sorry.”

“But…” the man spluttered. “There… he was fine. Last week, he was fine.” His eyes widened suddenly, still looking past her. “What are you…?!” Emily turned right as Aureilo hopped up on the bed, nostrils flaring.

Albert lay still.

“You might want to call a nurse,” Aureilo said calmly, nodding to the button next to the bed. “His heart’s failing.” Emily hit the button, stepping back as the room burst into activity, but it was a slow panic. A resigned panic. Everyone moved like they knew what was coming.

Aureilo stayed on the bed.

Albert’s tiny chest shuddered and he looked at Aureilo. The hare inched forward and lay flat, pressing himself against the child’s side with his whiskers quivering intently and amber gaze locked on his face. Albert reached for him. “I’m here,” Aureilo said softly, and all eyes were on him as tiny trembling fingers stroked his ears. “It’s okay Albie. I’m here. I’m with you.”

“Widget?” said Albert hopefully, his voice breathy and broken, and then he said nothing at all.

 

* * *

“There are things on my screens that are so awful I wish they were never on my screens and that’s saying something, because I’ve had some pretty awful things on here before—” Garcia rambled on and Reid could hear the distinct misery in her voice. He would have smiled at it, glad that she was still kind enough to be miserable about this horror, except he was still battling his own anger and the faint resonations of a crippling misery echoing at him through the frayed link connecting him to his dæmon. Fortunately, he could—and did—shut those emotions out. Maybe it was a good thing they’d been so damaged. At least it spared him whatever…

He swallowed and leaned closer to the phone, the map under his elbow crinkling as he accidentally dragged it with him. “Garcia,” he said with mock firmness. “I’m sorry, but we really have to…”

“Oh. Oh! Yes, sorry, yes. I have done as the Bossman has asked. A comprehensive list of anyone who has access to the homeless population on a regular basis, regular enough that they wouldn’t seem out of place moving among them. There’s… not a few people. There are far too many people in your corner of Georgia without a home to call their own, hon.”

“Start with services aimed at children, especially if those services cross with any outside of the homeless population. Tutoring or education. Social services. If they go into a schools, this may be how they found their other targets once the homeless children became harder for them to capture or they ran out of whatever it is they’re looking for among them.”

He could practically hear her forcing herself to smile. “Can do, my handsome G-man. And… are _you_ okay?”

He blinked and almost unconsciously glanced up at the door of the office to make sure he was still alone. Of course, he was. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Oh… you know. Bad memories and things. It’s okay if you’re not, you know. Oh hey, we have a group dedicated to supplying food and clothes to younger homeless people that travel. Looks like they’ve made it to three of the five towns kids have gone missing from within the timeframe. Info on the way.”

His phone beeped and he tapped it at, bringing up the files. “Thanks, Garcia. And I’m fine.”

“Okay good. Now, I’m going to continue trawling the awfulness. Bring those kids home, okay?”

“Of course.” The price was far too high for them to fail this one.

 

* * *

 

There was a stringy kind of look to someone who had spent a long time being unloved, and when JJ sat in the chair next to the bed with the blank-faced teenaged occupant, she saw it immediately. It broke her heart.

“My name is Jennifer,” she said gently, the room silent but for the sound of the machines monitoring the girl. Her brown eyes stayed locked on the heart monitor, tracking the flickering line, hand moving in quick circles over the blanket like she was trying to pet something invisible. JJ swallowed and lay her own palm flat on the blanket, feeling the thin line of the girl’s leg under the blanket. The hand paused. “What’s your name?” Without looking, the girl lay her hand on JJ’s and traced her skin with the tips of her fingers. JJ let her. God only knew how long it had been since someone had touched her without meaning her harm. The girl kept stroking her hand, her touch feather-light. She didn’t look at JJ, and she didn’t answer.

“Please,” JJ said. “We want to help find who did this to you. To all the children. Can you tell me your name?”

Nothing.

JJ closed her eyes and did exactly what she hadn’t wanted to do. She did what she’d done before, years ago. It was cruel then and it was still cruel now.

> “Stop this! You’re just waiting to die, Spence! I can’t… I can’t watch you die.”
> 
> “…”
> 
> “Aureilo. His name is Aureilo, and if you die he does to. Say it, Spence. Say it.”
> 
> “No.”
> 
> “ _Aureilo_.”

“What’s your dæmon’s name?” The fingers stopped moving, and JJ heard her suck in a long breath. The heart monitor jumped.

> _“Aureilo!”_

“What form did he like best?”

> “Stop it. Stop it _stop it stop it.”_

“Was he a cat? I have a friend with a cat. His name is Sergio. She likes to carry him around her neck, like a scarf. Did you carry your dæmon like that?”

> “He’s right here, Spencer, _look_! I’m touching him! You’re _hurting him_!”

JJ watched a tear track down the girl’s thin cheek and it was just like Spence, exactly like it, pushing him until he’d broken and screamed and finally…

“I want my dæmon,” sobbed both the girl and the memory of Spence in JJ’s memories. “I want him, I want him, I want him.”

> “ _I want him I want him please please please…”_

And now it was different, because back then they’d had Aureilo to hand to him, to see the dawning shock and comprehension on his wasted features as his narrow hands had fumbled and wrapped around the hollow shape of his emaciated hare. But, now, they had nothing. She’d hurt this girl, this lonely, frightened girl, and she had nothing to give her in return. But if she hadn’t of, they couldn’t find the others. _Kayla. And the nameless, countless others that no one knew to miss._

“What was his name?”

“Mayboralin,” the girl replied finally, looking at JJ for the first time, and there was the same emptiness in her eyes that the children had but tempered by age and distance and pain. JJ wondered how long it had been since she’d had her soul stolen. “His name was Mayboralin. He let me keep him. I was his prize. His prize for what he did to the children, and he let me keep Maybe until he settled so long as I was good and didn’t cry and kept them quiet and laid down pretty for him when he needed it.” She closed her eyes and her hand gripped JJ’s so tightly her fingertips tingled.

JJ flipped her hand carefully and clung back, letting the girl take any comfort she needed. “What’s your name?” she asked again, despite the thousands of questions that clamoured to be asked first, because she’d hurt this girl so bad she at least owed to her to give her name back to her.

The girl blinked and looked down at their hands entwined. “Nothing,” she whispered. “I don’t have a name. It died with Mayboralin. He burned him, you know.”

JJ couldn’t move.

“He burned him,” the girl continued, her turn to strike back. “They made me watch. They cut us in half and it hurt, but it didn’t hurt me when they burned him. Nothing but golden ashes when they burned him. Him and me because he was my name. He _was_ a cat.” She smiled dreamily, brokenly. “I did carry him around my neck. Just like a scarf. Until they burned him. Do you think I could see your friend’s dæmon? I just want to see. One more time. Please?”

Emily was outside the room when JJ staggered out, feeling scraped raw and cold, like someone had reached inside her and dragged every emotion out, leaving her hollow. Emily looked at her, and some distant part of JJ noted how tired she looked, the dark rings under her eyes, the lines around her mouth that hadn’t been there this morning.

Sergio was around her neck.

“Albert died,” Emily said quietly, and JJ began to cry.

 

* * *

 

Morgan followed, after a hesitation that was just long enough for Rossi to know he’d hit a sore spot on the man. Oh, how openly weaknesses are worn. He felt the slight pull of Eris drawing right to the edge of their limit cease as she stopped, and he stopped also. He trusted her. If she couldn’t tempt their little mice out of their holes, nothing could. He examined the ground and found a patch of cement just clean enough that he could lean against it without writing his pants off, and waited. The soft addition of paws and boots behind him announced Morgan finally deciding to join the party.

“Done sulking?” Rossi asked cheerfully, not keeping his voice down—the last thing he needed was the kids thinking he was trying to sneak around their dubious home—and inched over to make room on the grimy ledge. “You know, whatever hang-ups you have about dæmons, we don’t have room for them on our team. We do what we have to do to save lives, no matter how odd or unprecedented. You’ve been here longer than I have to know that.” Alright, he never said he was the pep-talk kinda guy. That was Hotch. Rossi was more of a ‘buck-the-fuck-up’ kinda guy.

Morgan grunted, and stared into the dark with his flashlight hovering uncertainly on the dirty water flowing past. “It’s…” the man started, trailing off. “Complicated.”

Obviously.

“Here if you want to talk,” Rossi said, and left it at that. Morgan was a grown man. He’d talk or he wouldn’t. One way or the other, it would come a head eventually. Preferably before it managed to deepen the rift between him and Reid. There was a noticeable discord in the team these days, and Rossi had the distinct impression it had begun before he’d even contemplated coming back from retirement. That didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t intend upon working to mend it.

“Thanks,” Morgan said finally, and they waited for Eris to return. When she did, she wasn’t alone.

 

* * *

 

JJ went out for air, and she wasn’t the first. As soon as she stepped out the side door, she saw him. He was hunched over near a water feature that gurgled happily, staring at the ripples left by the plummeting streams of water.

“Are you okay?” she asked, feeling Kailo poke out of her shirt to peer down as well at the miserable looking dæmon.

“Fine,” Aureilo said shortly, turning his back on them both. “This has been a monumental waste of time. They can’t tell us a thing.”

JJ thought of Albert and the final suggestion of a smile. He’d died thinking he wasn’t alone.  “Not all of it was a waste of time,” she said gently, crouching down to trail her fingers in the water. “What you did for Albie…”

“Sentimental and trite,” the hare snapped. “What did it matter that I gave him two seconds of thinking his dæmon was back. It didn’t change anything…”

She noted with a dark kind of humour that the hare was about as good at masking his emotions as the human was, even if he was slightly more abrasive in his manner. “It was good,” she disagreed, closing her eyes for a moment to try and clear the memory away. “Now we go and catch these guys, and we make sure no one ever needs to do it again.”

Aureilo turned and narrowed his gaze at her. “You’ve been crying. You’re too emotionally invested.”

“It’s upsetting,” Kailo mumbled, his murmuring voice muffled further by her shirt. If it wasn’t for the hare’s hearing, she doubted he would have heard the soft whisper. “We can do our jobs and still _feel_ , Aureilo. We’re not robots, despite you pretending we are.”

“Hey,” JJ scolded her dæmon, the same time Aureilo protested with a loud, “What’s that supposed to mean!?”

“You feel too little,” Kailo said, crawling further out and waving his wings. It was the most animated he’d been since they’d heard about the children’s return. “And Spence feels too much. You’re out of sync.”

“You’re out of line,” Aureilo said, his voice sharp, and the fur along his spine was ridged in a dark line. “You don’t—what is she doing…?”

JJ turned, following his gaze, just in time to see the teenager slip out of the door and pad quietly away across the damp grass. “Oh hell,” she said. Kailo ducked back into her shirt to avoid being blown away by the wind as she jogged after the girl. “Hey, wait!”

Aureilo bounded past. “I’ll get her,” he called back, and before she could warn him that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, he’d rocketed away around the corner and out of sight. She turned that corner just in time to see Aureilo in front of the motionless girl standing uncertainly on the curb of the empty side-street, looking down at the hare like he was a ghost. Aureilo moved forward, hopping a couple of steps sideways coaxingly. She stepped towards him once, turning away from the road. One more time. JJ breathed out.

And something slammed into her head and brought pain as starbursts of light across her vision. She cried out, Kailo cried out, and the world tipped and brought her to the ground as the wavering figure above her raised its arms again.

_Gun_ , she thought desperately, but her hand ignored her. _Cell?_

_Don’t pass out._

There was a squeal and something small hurtled overhead, striking the figure, kicking. The last thing she saw before falling into darkness was the figure striking back.

The squealing stopped.

Everything stopped.


	5. My Fair Lady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set a man to watch all night,
> 
> Watch all night, watch all night,
> 
> Set a man to watch all night,
> 
> My fair lady.

“Have you heard of Outreach?” Reid slid the glossy pamphlet Garcia had sent him across the table for the exhausted looking man to examine. His son was missing, the second child taken, and Reid could see the tell-tale signs of weeks of strain on his face and posture. He looked defeated in a way that the other parents hadn’t reached yet. “It’s a program for homeless youth that’s been operating in the surrounding areas.”

“I think they did a talk at Kyle’s school,” the man said eventually after a few minutes of scanning the small type. When he looked up, he pushed the pamphlet towards his dæmon almost unconsciously. _Apteryx haastii,_ Reid thought, eyeing the odd bird as it reached an oversized talon out and drew the pamphlet closer to the tip of its long bill. It didn’t give Reid much to work on, even if he was inclined to profile using the man’s dæmon. Contrary to Morgan’s belief, he didn’t actually know everything, and his knowledge of kiwis was… inadequate. “Ages ago though. They’re um… feeding the homeless, yeah? And education and stuff.”

“They work to reintegrate children who are classed as part of the long-term transient population back into society,” Reid informed him, trying not to fidget as uneasiness fed through his link with Aureilo. That was hard to hide when his heart had started hammering like he’d been running, sweat beginning to trickle down his spine. “This includes education and health services, as well as entertainment to try and draw more children into viewing the program as appealing.”

The man shrugged tiredly. “Yeah, they spoke at the school. I think they ran some sort of awareness dance a couple of weeks back. The Sunday before Kyle… he went, anyway. Had a blast. Haven’t really seen much since on them though, you know? I don’t really pay attention.”

_No one does_ , a voice snapped bitterly in the back of Reid’s mind, and he forced a smile. “That’s okay, Mr. Minchin. Anything you do remember will be a great help to the investigation.”

“You think they have something to do with it?”

Reid had to tread carefully. They were sitting on a powder keg of tension and the wrong word could light the fuse. “We think that they’re uniquely placed to give us an insight into the case that few other organizations are,” he said finally. The man looked unconvinced, narrowing his eyes at the pamphlet. His dæmon clicked her beak warningly, talons scratching the tabletop. A dull pain throbbed behind Reid’s eyes and he rubbed at them, red spots dancing on his retinas. Brilliant. Perfect time for a headache. He opened his mouth to say something and the pain crested, bringing with it a wave of nausea and dizziness and _fear_ that had him launching to his feet, stumbling into the table with a crash and the horrendous sound of steel scraping cement.

“Excuse me,” he said wildly, or tried to, the words tumbling awkwardly out of his mouth. “I…”

The ground tipped out from under him. He grabbed the chair, bringing it down with him as he fell into an almost welcome unconsciousness.

This wasn’t his pain.

This wasn’t him.

_Aureilo!_

 

* * *

 

They didn’t realize right away and Hotch would dwell on that later because maybe if they had—maybe if one of them had gone out with her instead of letting her slip out of the premises alone—she’d still be there quietly talking to the traumatized children instead of gone without a trace. Except, not exactly without a trace.

“Agent Hotchner?” Sheriff Robin called. He ducked under the crime scene tape looped over the entrance of the alleyway and came forward, his mink racing around his feet with her tail high and nose low. “Bus with your man on it just pulled in. He’s out cold. Security pulled up every camera feed they have of the outside area—we’ve got Agent Jareau and the dæmon on two feeds, then they run over here and outta sight.”

“Why?” Hotch asked, ignoring the uncomfortable way his stomach lurched at the man’s casual dismissal of Reid. Reid was the only reason they’d realized as quickly as they had. Within minutes of him passing out in the precinct, Hotch had a panicked deputy on the phone to him and a medic bringing the unconscious agent in. Hotch had looked for Aureilo then, until Prentiss had pointed out that JJ was oddly absent…

Robin’s mouth twisted, cool eyes scanning the ground and lingering on the spray of blood on the rough surface of the curb. One of them, or both, had been taken by force. “Looks like they were trying to stop that teenager we picked up. She snuck out, somehow, and took off. Meeting your ‘unsub’ perhaps?”

“Working together?” Hotch mused out loud, turning on his heel and examining the alleyway opening. It was simply a thoroughfare for delivery trucks to the hospital to bring supplies, with multiple exits lining the sides and packing crates stacked carefully against the walls. Plenty of places for someone to stand. Plenty of drives tucked away to park a vehicle without being seen. Plenty of tire tracks to hide theirs. Damn.

He needed his team, _all_ his team. But Reid was already being admitted and would likely stay that way unless he woke up before—Hotch quickly stopped _that_ train of thought. This unsub wasn’t Intercising the children right away, it was unlikely JJ or Aureilo would be… but he hadn’t taken an adult before, either.

Rossi and Morgan were stuck in the tunnels with the child they’d managed to coax into talking to them. Hotch knew neither of them would agree to leave there without the child, whether or not they’d said as much over the phone. He’d already called social services and organized for them to meet them when his agents brought her in. At least one of the homeless kids would be out of danger then. He’d reluctantly ordered Emily to stay within the confines of the hospital. She could talk to people, see what they knew, but he needed her there when Reid was brought in. They could re-evaluate her position if—when—Reid woke up. But there was one of their team he could still access.

“Boss!” Garcia sounded shrill over the crackly phoneline, which was odd, because he hadn’t actually told her about what had happened yet. “Okay so, don’t yell at me, but you know you can’t really blame me but um I kinda put a little dooflicky thing that does an alert thing if any of you guys get admitted to hospital and so it just dinged and why did it ding, it can’t have dinged.”

“Garcia,” he said firmly, cutting her off before she passed out from lack of air. “JJ is missing. Aureilo with her—it looks as though he may have been injured during his abduction. Reid is under observation for the time being.”

Her shrillness grew, if possible, shriller. Hal flinched and eyeballed the cell, her ears folding back, before padding off heavily to peer down each of the side-roads in turn, her nose carefully skimming the ground. “Observation as in ‘just a precaution’ observation or observation as in ‘possibly really bad’ observation? Because I want to believe it’s just a precaution but it’s _never_ just a precaution with Reid and wait, what happened to JJ? How is she missing? She can’t be missing. She’s _JJ_.”

“Garcia.” Silence fell on the other end, broken by the soft hitch of barely restrained sobs. Hotch felt for her. He knew she felt helpless, but right now, she was the least helpless of all of them and she needed to know that. “We need your help. We think JJ was following one of the Intercised children, a teenager. We don’t know this girl’s name, but we know her dæmon’s. Can you check the registry along with a physical description of her?”

“Yes.” The shrillness was gone, replaced by a firm surety that had a small voice that sounded suspiciously like Rossi whispering _Atta ‘girl_ in the back of Hotch’s mind. “Of course. I will find this girl and I will call you back in two shakes of Tupelo’s tail. And by then, because you are all fantastic, you will have found JJ and can all come _home_.”

“Thank you. Sending the information through. Good luck.”

“I don’t need luck; I’m too damn good for luck. Sir?” The hitch was back, controlled this time. Hotch could hear keys being hammered in the background, her mind already locked on her task with the minimal information she had at that point.

“Yeah?”

“Keep them safe?”

Hal turned and stared at him as he answered, her tail low and eyes intent. Hotch could see the sheriff beyond her with his cell to his ear and his face grim. “Of course.”

Robin hung up and strode towards Hotch as Hotch lowered his own cell. “Your agent is almost certainly with our unsub,” he called to Hotch, carding the fingers of one hand through his bristly hair and letting his hat drop back down over his brow. “We’ve just got two more kids taken, not even a block from here.”

Hotch clenched his fist against his side, letting his suit jacket hide the furious movement. “They’re escalating,” he said finally, turning back towards the hospital. He needed Emily. He needed _Reid_.

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’re running out of time.”

 

* * *

 

The kid that followed Eris out of the tunnel stood maybe up to Rossi’s thigh, if he was on tiptoe. Rossi cussed violently in his head before crouching and hearing Morgan doing the same, trying to look as friendly and non-threatening as possible. Eris hopped awkwardly on the ground, ungainly on her large talons, swivelling her head to watch the kid and then back to look at Rossi with a fierce expression that said, ‘Don’t screw this up, Dave.’ Rossi felt his cell begin to vibrate incessantly and ignored it. They needed this kid. He _knew_ that the homeless population here was the key to cracking this case wide open, before anyone else was…

“This is Ally,” Eris said in a lowered tone she rarely used, soft and gentle, and Rossi realized with a spark of shock that under the choppy haircut and layers of grime, the kid was a _girl_. Damnit, call him a sexist, but in that moment, he’d have picked her up and walked out of here in a heartbeat just to make the idea of her being here alone hurt less. She was just so damn _vulnerable._ Her dæmon loomed out after her, at least, Rossi assumed it was her dæmon. For her size, she had to be about six or seven. Her dæmon should have been a pup, just a spit of a thing. He wasn’t. He was gangly and half-grown and bared his teeth at them like he was a second from lashing out.

Reid’s voice floated through his mind, unwelcome. _“One of the biggest indicators of sexual abuse is the dæmon. Often, in stark contrast to physical abuse cases where dæmons often try to remain small and infantile in order to try and provoke protective instincts, sexual abuse causes dæmons to develop at a far greater rate, often taking predatory forms. It’s a way of regaining agency over themselves and their bodies.”_

Well, shit.

“You’re police,” Ally said hesitantly, biting at her lip with a quick flash of white teeth on her grubby face. “Not s’posed to talk to police. Jack says not to.”

“We’re good guys,” Morgan said soothingly, and Rossi saw her take a quick three steps back, eyes darting around the gloom. They were going to lose her. They were too big, too old, too male. They needed JJ.

His cell buzzed again. Morgan tensed as Ally stepped back once more, saying nothing, the whites of her eyes showing. Terrified. They were scaring the shit outta her. If it wasn’t for Eris gently coaxing her, she’d have bolted already. Clearly she was used to seeking comfort from dæmons, and not people. That thought broke his heart.

“Damn,” Morgan muttered as she shook her head at Eris and turned to duck into the tunnels. They could chase her, but if they lost her… that was it. “She likes dogs. Her dæmon’s a dog.”

Rossi tensed. “Derek,” he said carefully, because the kind of prejudice the man had shown didn’t shift in an hour. But then again, Morgan had always put the job first.

Naemaria padded past slowly, her tail waving. She dropped onto her belly, tail still waving, rolling onto her back as soon as the girl paused to look at her. Tongue hanging out goofily and oversized paws in the air, she looked ridiculous. Ally giggled. And came back, squatting next to the dog. When she smiled, Rossi could see gaps in her teeth. She leaned down, cupping a hand over her mouth and whispering into Naemaria’s ear, her mouth brushing the dog’s fur.

Morgan flinched and turned away.

“Good work,” Rossi whispered, right before his cell hummed again. “Damnit, _what_?”

Five missed calls from Hotch. He had a sudden feeling that something had probably gone very wrong.

“The dæmons will stay with her,” Morgan said, eyeing the cell nervously. “If we go up around the corner, she might relax, and you can call him back.” All of Rossi’s instincts were telling him not to let her out of his sight in case she wasn’t there when he came back, but Morgan was right. He followed the other man, hitting redial before they’d even rounded the corner. Hotch’s crisp ‘Dave’ wasn’t as crisp as usual. He sounded out of breath, like he’d been running.

“Problem, Aaron?” Rossi asked, feeling a roll of curiosity from his nosy owl. “Connection down here is shite. We’re in the tunnels—”

“Dave.” Hotch cut him off sharply, and Rossi almost groaned. What _now?_ “JJ’s missing. She went outside for air and never came back.”

Rossi realized he’d been staring at Morgan for far too long without actually saying anything. “How do you know she’s gone?” he asked finally, watching Morgan’s skin wash out slightly in the light of the flashlights. “She could have gotten caught up somewhere else in the hospital.”

“Aureilo was with her. He’s gone too and they just brought Reid in. He collapsed at the precinct. They’re still waiting for him to regain consciousness. We’re looking everywhere, but they’ve just vanished. No one saw a thing. We have them on camera running off the grounds, then _nothing_.”

Morgan had his head close to the earpiece, listening intently. “Wait, Aureilo’s gone too?” he asked sharply. “Where have they taken Reid?”

“He’s… in the DICU. For now, until we find them. Garcia’s trying to do a trace on JJ’s phone.”

The horror of the confirmation of Reid’s location wasn’t lost on Rossi, despite not having been privy to his previous state. “We’ll head back as soon as we can,” he told Hotch grimly, trying to read Morgan’s expression in the uneven illumination. “We’ll find them. JJ’s tough as nails, and Reid’s been without his dæmon before. We’ll have her _and_ the mouthy rabbit back by dinner.”

“Let’s hope so,” Hotch replied, a darkness to his tone that told Rossi that the man was already neck-deep in self-recrimination. Fantastic. “We’ll see you soon.”

Rossi looked hard at Morgan as the line cut off. “Hey,” he said, his voice echoing around them. He flinched and lowered it as Morgan glanced warily at the corner around which their dæmons were talking to the little tunnel-wraith. “This is fine. We’ll get them back, all three of them. Aureilo being taken is a _good_ thing. Once Reid wakes up, he’ll be able to lead us straight to them.” Morgan opened his mouth but the voice that spoke next wasn’t his.

“They’ve got him,” said a quiet voice, and when they turned, Ally was there with one hand on Naemaria’s ruff and the other touching her own dæmon fretfully. “The Snatchers. You said his dæmon was gone? That’s the Snatchers.”

“The Snatchers?” Morgan asked.

Ally nodded violently. “They take you and your dæmon and bring you back empty. Your friend is gonna be empty too, just like the others.”

“What others, hon?” Rossi said, glancing sharply at Eris. She just blinked slowly, eyes glowing oddly in the dim lighting.

Ally hesitated. Then she pointed, further into the tunnels. “Jack makes the empties stay away,” she said, shuddering as though almost overcome by an overwhelming fear. “They’re all wrong. I don’t want to see them.”

Shit.

“Can you show us what way to go?” Morgan asked, his voice composed. Like what he was asking was nothing at all, really. “You don’t have to come all the way.”

Another nod, this one slower. “Okay,” she said, and Rossi could hear an iron-clad stubbornness in the mulish word that would have brought a smile in less dire circumstances. “If I show you, you can put your friend down there too when he’s empty.”

Then she walked off, as cheerful as though she hadn’t just sunk a stake of horror through all of their hearts.

 

* * *

 

When she first walked into the room, it was like stepping into the past. There was no air. She couldn’t breathe. She just stood there, as close to panic as she’d been for a very long time, and stared at the still form in the bed. And he was so fucking still. No Aureilo by his side.

Just like before.

The panic passed as the doctor leaned oven him, and in its place came anger born from fear.

“He’s in the wrong ward,” Emily said, striding forward. Hotch wasn’t there. Looking for JJ. Looking for Aureilo.

DeVere looked up. There was an expression on his face like he wasn’t entirely sure of his footing. His eyes skimmed her, and down to Sergio, then back to her face and lingered. “His dæmon is absent,” he replied quietly. “The DICU is specialized to cases such as this.”

“He can travel from his dæmon,” she insisted, setting her mouth in a stubborn line. She couldn’t stay. She had to help Hotch find out what had happened to JJ, but she also couldn’t leave Reid in the fucking DICU, alone. Not again.

“Be that as it may,” the doctor continued, “his dæmon has almost certainly taken an injury in order for Dr. Reid to have been rendered unconscious in this manner. Therefore, _when_ his dæmon is recovered—a hare, yes? Lovely creatures—he will be brought here.” Emily stared at him as he smiled uneasily and she realized what he was doing. He was being… supportive. Thus far, all he’d been was brusque. She realized the difference. Before, they were FBI. Hardened, trained and here to do a job, just like him.

Now they were victims.

“We can’t leave him,” Sergio murmured, jumping up onto the bed and turning a quick half circle on Reid’s lap. The heart monitor beeped steadily. DeVere raised an eyebrow at the cat’s proximity to the man. She could see him making assumptions.

_Fuck_ his assumptions. They did things differently. It didn’t mean they did them wrong.

“I’m not leaving,” Sergio added as she failed to respond. “So don’t bother trying.”

“Okay,” she said finally, leaning against the wall with one hand resting on her pocket. “Okay. Let’s hope he doesn’t keep us waiting. We’re walking out of here today.”

They couldn’t do it again if they didn’t.

 

* * *

 

There was a split second as the scrawny girl’s hand had brushed Naemaria’s ruff when all Morgan wanted to do was vomit.

Then the feeling passed.

The thing with touching dæmons, he’d found, was the _intent_. And he never let anyone touch Naemaria, not anymore. Not after Buford. But he knew the theory behind it.

There was a jolt of a cold that sunk into his core and send a sharp hum of panic down his spine, but it was quickly replaced with a curiosity that wasn’t just Naemaria’s. It was the girl’s too, this little Ally, and Morgan almost swore when he realized that he knew her from that touch as easily as if he’d sat her down in an interrogation room for five hours and had her speak freely about herself. Curiosity, fear, hunger, and a fierce friendliness that she somehow hadn’t had broken yet. In that moment, he knew he wasn’t leaving her here. Even if that was an option, it wasn’t happening.

He followed her deeper into the tunnels and she kept her hand tight on Naemaria, her dæmon shifting into a smaller boxer with an awkward gait, pressing again Naemaria’s side tightly. Rossi followed and said nothing, his mouth set in a thin line of worry. _JJ_. She’d be fine. Rossi was right—she was tough as nails. Morgan had no doubt she’d already be turning this to her advantage. They’d probably find out where she was and by the time they got there, she’d have already arrested the unsub and would be midway through getting a decent meal into the kidnapped kids. Yeah. That seemed like JJ.

He carefully didn’t think about Reid.

Naemaria hesitated, turning her head to press back against Ally’s chest and stop her from walking forward. Morgan took the chance to step closer, ready to grab her if she tried to take off.

“Do you smell that?” Rossi said, and Morgan inhaled carefully. Beyond the reek of the tunnels and the overwhelming stink of waste was something sharp and acidic… pervading. Familiar.

“We’re not supposed to go down there,” Ally said uncertainly, wrapping her arm around Naemaria and pulling her close like a child would its parents’ dæmon. Morgan shoved back the wave of protectiveness that wasn’t just his own as Naemaria turned woeful eyes on him, almost pleading. “It smells.”

“Stay with the kid,” Rossi said, edging past the group. “We’ll go.” Eris clung to his shoulder, oversized and shapeless in the gloom, her eyes much more suited to this than Naemaria’s or the humans’.

“Be careful, old man,” Morgan called after him, listening to his steady footsteps fade slightly. Never out of hearing though. They weren’t that cocky.

A soft sniff from the girl. “It’s alright,” Naemaria said after a moment. “He’s not far. It’s not that scary down here.” The girl nodded, looking back at Morgan and smiling oddly. Morgan considered for a moment that maybe Aureilo was onto something here. He’d never admit it though. Reid would never let him live it down.

“Do you have family here, Ally?” Morgan asked, squatting down with half his attention on the dark passage where his partner had vanished. Ally nodded, still wary with him. He shot a look at Naemaria.

Yep, never telling Reid about this.

“Where do you sleep?” the dog asked, nudging her with her nose. Ally giggled, then shrugged.

“With Jack sometimes. He’s _eight_.” She said eight like it was some impossibly wise age. Morgan had the sudden sensation she hadn’t been down here so long. “Flakky doesn’t like it down here. It makes his fur sticky. Can we go where it doesn’t smell?”

“Is Jack your brother? Can you take us to him?” Naemaria asked carefully. Footsteps echoed towards them; Rossi coming back. Morgan steeled himself for what he knew was coming.

Ally shook her head and looked down at the ground. Her dæmon whined. “We can’t,” he said, shrinking back against Naemaria. “He went out. We were supposed to go too, but we get shouted at, so we stayed. And he didn’t come back. Can you find him? And Aisling?”

Ah, hell.

“We’re looking for Jack,” Naemaria said in the silence that followed. “Would you like to help us?” Ally nodded slowly and reached up. Morgan took her hand, his heart slamming in his chest. One wrong move and they’d lose the both of them to the rabbit warren of tunnels.

“Morgan.” Rossi’s face was a ghastly white in the light. There was something in his arms, a small bundle that lay horribly still against his chest. “We’re gonna need medics. And Hotch.”

 

* * *

 

She woke up in a four by four cell with a humming machine hanging a glittering blade in the air above her. She didn’t wake up alone.

“Aureilo!” she gasped, struggling against the binds that tied her into a kneeling position. Her entire body _hurt_. She didn’t think she’d been out for long. She remembered being awake in the van. She remembered flashes of the drive. She had a vague memory of the teenager pressed against her side, talking to a man who hid his expression behind a dark beard. She remembered two kids staring at her, their faces streaked with tears and crying for their dæmons. And then all she remembered was… being carried. And the smell of gunpowder.

On the other side of the blade was a small wired cage containing the motionless form of her best friend’s dæmon, his long legs thrown outwards in a parody of his usual careful manner. She could just see the rapid rise and fall of his chest through the mesh. She could just see the blood that matted his fur to the bottom of the cage.

“I can go,” Kailo whispered, inching out of her shirt, his voice groggy from the disorientation they both shared. “I’ll see if he’s okay.”

She heard footsteps coming towards the room, barely audible through the heavy door. “No,” she said, seeing Aureilo begin to stir feebly, his paws twitching. “Stay hidden. He doesn’t know you’re here.” She looked up at the blade and felt her stomach drop heavily. “He _can’t_ know you’re here.”

“Where are we?” Aureilo slurred, trying to stand and falling again. JJ flinched. She didn’t know how badly he was hurt. Her team could be working without her _and_ without Reid. She _had_ to get out of here. The door opened. A man walked in; a man with white-blonde hair and dark eyes that stared right through her. Behind him, his dæmon slunk in, sticking close to the wall with her ears low. A hare. A pale, skeletal copy of Aureilo that stared at the caged dæmon like he was her salvation.

“Your name and the term you refer to your creature as,” said the man. “Answer me.” His voice was monotonous: empty. His dæmon stared at nothing, like a ghost. Aureilo reared in the cage, hissing furiously and lashing at the sides with his powerful hind legs. So much more _alive_ than the other hare, even in this moment.

She intended upon keeping him that way.

“Go to hell,” she spat, feeling Kailo trembling against her chest. He lay his wings flat against her skin, tucking himself against the wire of her bra, silent and hidden and _scared_. She wouldn’t admit how scared she was. This man would never know she feared him.

A gun. He aimed it at her. That was fine. She didn’t think he’d shoot her.

He aimed it at Aureilo.

She went cold. _No._

She could see it vividly. Reid—explaining a concept to Emily or planning a profile with Hotch—falling as the bullet tore through his dæmon. Never getting up. Everything that made him _him_ silenced in a single moment. Or, maybe even worse, maybe he wouldn’t fall. Maybe he’d just fall silent, his eyes turning blank again.

Maybe it would be Hankel all over again, but without even a hope of salvation.

“Jennifer,” she said around the images of Reid hunched in a chair with his hand tracking endless repetitions on the rough surface of the table next to him. “Special Agent Jennifer Jareau with the FBI. You don’t have to do this. We can help you, if you let us.” There was no hiding the pleading in her voice. What would happen if he used the machine above? If the knife fell between them? Her and Kailo would be fine, but would it affect Spence? Would it affect Aureilo? She didn’t have enough information. Trapped in a room with a hare with an IQ of 187, and she couldn’t move for fear of the knowledge she didn’t possess.

The man smiled at her and she fought her bounds, because his hand was moving towards the lever that would slice down neatly between them, and she didn’t know what would happen. “You’re already helping me, Jennifer. You have no idea how important you are. Your beast, speak its name.” His dæmon inched forwards, eyes locking hungrily on her.

Aureilo turned and looked at her, and his gaze was sharp and so much like Spence it hurt. She returned that gaze, wordlessly apologising in case this went horribly, horribly wrong. Kailo shifted against her breast. She heard the faintest whisper, barely audible. “Don’t let him realize you’re not Intercised,” he called, tapping his legs delicately on her skin. “We depend on it.” She swallowed. Nodded. And looked up into the man’s mad—and he was mad, she could see it—eyes.

“Aureilo.” The blade whistled as it fell.

They didn’t even have to pretend to scream.


	6. Ladybird Ladybird

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,
> 
> Your house is on fire,
> 
> Your children shall burn!

Hotch pulled up to the new crime scene alone except for the barely calm Hal in the passenger seat. They took a moment between pulling the car into park and walking towards the milling throng of law enforcement and medical services, assorted dæmons huddled at the side of the group with eyes wide and bellies flat to the ground. The case had just gone from simply awful to the kind of case that would haunt them for a long time, he could tell from the shattered pitch to Dave’s voice, even over the phone. His cell hummed in his pocket and he slipped it out, already knowing who it was before his slid his thumb across the slippery-smooth screen to answer it. “Garcia. Did you find her?”

“Yes.” The answer was quiet, hurt. There was none of her usual cheer or excitement. “No ‘Aislings’ that fit, but I looked up ‘Mayboralins’ in the states and there are five. One female, three adult and settled, and… one belonging to an ‘Amber Wyant.’ Missing since ’07, registered by her mom when she was two until her mom died in ’05. She went to live with her uncle, who has since been up for all kinds of icky things, and then ran away in ’07 after attempting to take her own life. Or you know… didn’t run away. Because she’s here. Here and they might have taken her and oh god, Hotch, if they did they’ve had her for three years. How is that possible? How did no one _know_?”

He closed his eyes. “Sometimes people slip through the cracks. We’ll find her, Garcia. Her and JJ.”

“And when you do… she has nowhere to go.” A muffled sniff hummed through the line as she tried to hide her tears, and his heart ached. “Absolutely nowhere to go.”

“We’ll find her.”

It was all he could say. When she hung up with a quiet affirmative that she’d keep looking for the other children, he felt like he’d failed her.

The car door echoed as it slammed shut behind them. It echoed, despite the good two dozen people there, because no one was making a sound. An eerie kind of hush had settled on the crowd as Hotch held the crime scene tape up for Hal to duck under and followed her. No one looked at him, no one spoke. Radios crackled and Hotch could hear an overheated engine whining slightly, but the sounds seemed muted and distant with an atmosphere of stark horror that wove through them all. Stepping out from the crowd of humans and dæmons, he stopped. Hal stopped too, her ears flattening, people forming an unconsciously wide berth around her.

He could see Morgan standing by the opening of the sewer, his face carefully blank and Naemaria by his side. He could see Dave sitting in the open door of a police cruiser, his gaze turned away from the entrance and a bright orange shape huddled in his lap, the barest hint of dirty bare feet poking out from the bottom of the vivid blanket he’d wrapped the child in. But all of that seemed impossible to focus on as he watched the slow procession of carefully closed body bags. The stiff plastic did very little to hide the emptiness of the bags, three times too large to cover the sad contents within.

The world spun around him as he walked without faltering across that slow procession to where Morgan’s expression was fixed and conscious, his eyes lingering on every stretcher as though memorising each and every one and adding them to an invisible tally. One of the paramedics stumbled, made a harsh noise like a sob, and he reached out a hand to steady him. Someone else was muttering about the smell, their voice thin and confused like they were clinging to the one thing that they felt able to understand in this whole situation. Yet another voice floated across to them, barking orders.

“How many?” Hotch asked Morgan.

Morgan didn’t answer. He just breathed in, deeply, before steadying himself and speaking: “I’m going to put a bullet in this guy. He’s a dead man.”

Hotch didn’t feel even remotely ready to tackle that announcement yet, because he was horribly aware that his response was far from the, ‘you’ll do your job’ response that was required of him, and much closer to, ‘not if I get to him first.’ Instead, he nodded, brushed his hand against Morgan’s elbow in the only attempt at comfort he could think to offer, and turned to walk towards his Senior Agent.

“Don’t move the door,” Dave said dully when Hotch stepped up next to him, and Hotch carefully angled himself to peer in. Wide eyes stared back at him from the tightly wrapped bundle on Dave’s lap, the kid’s grime-encrusted hands leaving dark marks on his tie and shirt where they gripped the material tightly. Dave was blocking her view of the bodies. “Three alive. Only one they expect to make it to the hospital, and that’s a big _if._ ”

“How many dead?” Hotch asked quietly, and the girl didn’t even flinch.

Dave looked up at him and Hotch could see the rage and the rawness that Morgan was hiding written plainly across his friend’s expressive features. “Twelve dead,” he hissed, and Hotch heard an answering hiss from the seat behind him where Eris was huddled with her wing over the child’s dæmon protectively. “ _So far_ , Aaron. They’re not done digging around down there. How long has this been happening?”

Far too long. They’d been too late before they’d even stepped off the jet.

His cell hummed again and he almost flinched with the loud trill as it shattered the atmosphere of the scene. _Northside Hospital calling._

_Reid._

“Hotchner.” He watched as Dave’s gaze snapped at to stare at him, waiting for the worst. Expecting it.

“Agent Hotchner? Your agent is awake.”

 

* * *

 

Aureilo kept his body limp in the wire cage as the unsub carried him out. With the angle his head was at, the last thing he saw of Jennifer was a tilted sliver of her eyes staring at him as the heavy door slammed shut between them. Of Kailo, thankfully, there was no sign. He shoved all thoughts of the danger they were in to the back of his mind, focusing on examining the corridors they travelled through without being too blatant in his observations. The last thing they needed, any of them needed, was the unsub realizing that they weren’t Intercised. Or at least, realizing _he_ wasn’t Intercised. Maybe JJ… maybe JJ could play this to her advantage. He wished he could speak to her, just for a moment, formulate some kind of plan. He just had to _think_.

He couldn’t think of the blade slamming down and the crippling fear it had brought with it. That hurt too much. That felt far too much like being alone again. The leporid dæmon glanced back at him, her eyes dull and lifeless, shifting her gaze away again almost immediately. He wasn’t worried. He knew how to play the part of half a soul. 

If he reached for Spencer, all he could feel was emptiness. That was much more worrying. The moment when the unsubs boot had slammed down on his ribs… _damnit, Spencer._ He would have been hurt without even knowing the cause. He might even still be hurt, still reeling from the damage done to Aureilo.

_Is there damage?_ Aureilo closed his eyes and ran a quick inventory over his body. It was impossible to tell without being able to move, but there was a sharp stabbing in his belly that boded ill, and if he tensed, he could feel a spreading kind of pain around that area. Nothing that would cripple him though. He could work through it. He had to. Jennifer was depending on him to.

But he _should_ be able to tell where Reid was or at least have some rough idea, but there was nothing. Just a cold kind of painfully familiar emptiness and he didn’t have to fake the tremors that shook his body as the unsub pushed open a heavy steel door that ground loudly against the stone floor as it moved, walking down a brickwork flight of stairs into a dank basement that reeked of gunpowder and chemicals and ash. There was a whispering kind of noise to the basement, as though a breeze raced in endless circles around the room, and as they stepped out of the staircase and into the large square room, Aureilo squinted and tried to see if he could spot an exit. He saw a window, mounted high and barred. He saw a thick door set into one wall and recognised the design of it immediately. Coal furnace. By the looks of it, well used. He saw a heavy workbench covered in a blur of tools and instruments he couldn’t recognise without getting a closer look, the rack behind lined with pots and pots of oddly colour chemicals and white powders. And he saw the other wall. The wall that was made of a bank of cages, thin wired and occupied.

Barely.

He didn’t have to hide the horror or the crippling fear that slammed into him and twisted his gut into agony as he realized what he was looking at. The whispering became a keening whine of fear that he only realized he was making when the empty eyes within the cages turned to stare at him hungrily.

Dæmons.

Pale, ghostly shadows of dæmons, blank-eyed and empty. They whispered to themselves or huddled in the corners of their cages, and the ones that spoke called plaintively for their humans.

_“Erica, Erica, I’m lost, I’m lost. It’s dark.”_

_“I don’t like it. I want Mom. I want Giala. I want to go home.”_

_“We can’t go home. Home is gone, gone forever, gone like us.”_

_“It hurts it hurts, make it stop, it hurts.”_

The unsub opened a cage, tilting the carrier that Aureilo shivered in and sending him toppling in to lie panting on the wired floor. Below him, a half-grown beagle rocked and whined. To his right, an indistinct form flickered from shape to shape, each one as twisted as the next. To his left, a rat lay with his sides barely moving and mouth slightly open. Aureilo struggled up and pressed himself against the back of the cage, away from those dying souls.

“In your cleansing lies her ascension,” the unsub murmured, and shut the cage. “Through fire, I cast you back into the abyss from where you came, beast.” And he walked away, his footsteps echoing down the flight of stairs and followed by the grinding impenetrability of the steel door being closed. Sealing Aureilo in, but not alone.

“We hurt, we hurt,” moaned the beagle, turning heedless eyes upwards. “He’ll burn us all. Just like the others.”

“There were more before,” answered a chorus of others, and Aureilo looked at the empty cages and the adjacent furnace. The brickwork around the coal-grimed door glittered with gold. Then he stood and shook at the pain away.

No more.

 

* * *

 

“Babygirl.” Morgan kept his voice light, despite the rage burning through him. “Tell me you’ve got something good.”

Rossi’s gaze flickered to him from the driver’s seat, knuckles white around the steering wheel. He’d handed Ally over to social services reluctantly, after giving them his number and firmly instructing them to ‘be contactable or else’.

“Oh, my chocolate Adonis of Perfection, I have something _more_ than good. I have what we need to crack this case open like an overripe coconut, and all we need is a special little tool I like to call ‘the brain of the cutest little G-man out.’” Garcia was trying very hard to sound herself, but he could hear a savage kind of glee to her voice that meant that they were finally fucking getting somewhere. Despite the horrors of the day, his mouth twitched into what was almost a smile.

“Reid’s awake, you wanna call him after and pick his brain?” Morgan asked her, pushing away the quiet voice that whispered _but is he okay._

A long pause. “I already tried him,” she said cautiously. “He’s… not taking calls. Neither is Emily. And Hotch is still with the sheriff in and out of those awful tunnels.”

_Damn._ “Alright, give me what you’ve got,” he said, and put her on speaker.

“So, lab results from the kiddos’ clothes are back and, hoooh boy, we’ve got some chemicals in this lot. Potassium chlorate, strontium carbonate, potassium perchlorate: all in decently high trace amounts. All used in explosives, which is not so good, and all readily available. But of course, if they’ve brought them, there’s records of those sales, and I will sniff them out like a hound after a bone. Also, weirdly, turmeric. Not used in explosives, so maybe our guy likes to calm down after a hard day of being _monstrous_ by cooking. Ick.”

“Great,” Rossi muttered. “So our guy is a pyro. Fantastic. Just what we needed. Alright, Garcia, good work. We’ll head to the hospital and bounce this off of Reid. Get his input.”

“Wait, guys. That’s not all that Tupelo and I have scrounged out. We have some names. Not enough, not anywhere near enough, but… some of these kids, the street ones, we have names.”

Rossi’s head snapped around for a second before jerking back to the road. “Tell me,” he demanded. “I want their names. They won’t be forgotten again… not by me.”

“Nor me,” Naemaria agreed quietly.

 

* * *

 

“Where is Aureilo?” JJ asked as soon as the man walked back into the room, sans hare.

“You’re free of him,” the man said after a long moment of studying her. “I freed you.”

JJ froze. And thought, quickly, impossibly quickly, about her options. Intercised. He believed her Intercised. But he also believed she was… different. “Yes,” she said finally, slowly. “You did. Thank you. Thank you so much. And the children. I know there are children here, ready to be freed, I can… feel them. Can you take me to them?”

His eyes lit up. He actually looked… _happy_. “Of course,” he said, beaming, crouching to undo the binds around her hands and feet and helping her up, her limbs protesting the sudden movement. “You’re perfect. I knew you would be. Come see what I’ve done!” He clung to her hand, his own palm dry and warm, and she tried not to pull away. Kailo shivered in her shirt and she didn’t let the man see her fear. The children were depending on her not showing fear.

 

* * *

Reid wasn’t in his room. Morgan cussed and vanished, probably to find a nurse or the on-call doctor, but Rossi paced into the room thoughtfully and glanced around. The heart-monitor stood blank, the wiring tossed aside. The bedcovers were ruffled, clearly thrown aside by someone _really_ damn keen to be out of them. When he skimmed his hand over the sheets, they were cool to the touch. Empty a while then. Unlike Morgan, he wasn’t worried.

“Kid is back on the case already,” Eris said, clambering awkwardly down his arm and hopping across the bed. “His bag is still here, Dave. Casefiles, his notes. Look.”

Rossi took the file she dragged out the bag and towards him, flicking it open. Notes from the interview Reid was conducting before Aureilo was injured. Pages of information on a program called Outreach, the margins covered in scratchy, barely legible handwriting. A folded map, similarly decorated. Information on the parents, the missing children. One stood out, tabbed with bright blue sticky notes and a few sections circled in bold. _Contact Garcia – they were at Kyle’s school_ , was written across one pamphlet, a narrow line connecting the note with an italicised headline proclaiming _Outreach a smash hit with schools – new program kicks off with a BANG!!_

“Hmm,” Rossi hummed softly, and opened the pamphlet, eyes falling onto another bold note. _‘Practise?’_ was scrawled across a picture of a loose ring of students clustered, looking up with bright smiling faces at some sort of display overhead.

“Fireworks?” Eris asked, narrowing her eyes at the glossy paper. “A firework display during the day?”

“Explosives,” Rossi murmured, a sharp thrill darting down his spine at the realization. “Reid, you fantastic little shit, you’ve almost cracked it! We’ve got the bastards, Eris, we’ve got them!” She hooted dolefully, sweeping her wings out to glide after him as he turned on his heel and hurried out of the room, file clutched in one hand. He knew where Reid was.

Time to end this.

 

* * *

 

Emily followed Reid as the man strode determinedly down the hall, turning into the room where the Intercised children were without hesitating. Despite his determined confidence, he winced with every second step and she could see him buckling slightly like he wanted to unconsciously cover his belly.

“Reid,” she called, worry biting at her brain. “Wait…” She’d come back from getting a coffee to find him fiddling with the heart monitor, face grim and expression fiercely resolute. He’d barely said a word, just asked about JJ, asked about Aureilo, and then asked where the children were, leaving without even putting his shoes on. But there was a reason they hadn’t planned to expose him to the children. The memory of the trauma could… she stopped herself right there, shaking off the thoughts. Reid was doing his job. He was tougher than they gave him credit for.

He looked at her, his eyes sharp and with none of the traces of emptiness she usually associated with Aureilo being gone, and she nodded. “Alright, you lead,” she said, and followed him in. She stopped in the outside room, watching him through the window as he stepped in and faltered, his eyes skimming the children. Sergio hopped up into her arms, peering through as well.

“He’s onto something,” the cat commented carefully. “I recognise that look. Aureilo does the same kinda head-tilt thing when he’s thinking hard.” There was a button nearby that opened the speaker so she could hear what was being said in the room. She pressed it, cautious, ears focused and keen. The voice that floated through was clear.

_“Hello. I’m Spencer. Can I ask you something?”_

The boy didn’t even look up from where he was still curled on the chair, pillow to his chest. The girls slept, faces smooth and still and horribly pale. They probably wouldn’t wake up, and part of Emily thought that maybe that was a blessing. The other part of her hated that part for thinking that.

_“They took my dæmon,”_ the boy murmured, looking up slowly and staring at Reid. _“Why did they take her?”_ The same as when Hotch talked to him. This wasn’t going to get them anywhere… but if there was anyone who would get through to the boy, it was Reid.

_“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. Can you tell me something? Please. To help me find out why?”_

Silence. Reid crouched, his hands on the pillow, and Emily’s heart ached as the boy lowered one hand and picked up Reid’s palm, turning it over and examining it with an empty curiosity. _“Your dæmon is gone too,”_ he said suddenly, looking up. Sergio trembled. _“I can feel it. Did they take her too?”_

_“Yes.”_ Reid’s voice was matter-of-fact, and the boy shuddered. Even from here, Emily could see his eyes squinting to try to hide tears. _“How did they take you? I need to know, please, how did they catch you?”_

_“No.”_ The boy’s voice had turned mulish. _“I don’t know. They burned my Aisling. He made me watch. Then we came back to be a lesson.”_

_“He brought you back after burning your dæmon? To scare others, others like you? Street kids?”_

_“No. **He** didn’t.”_

The door opened behind Emily and Rossi walked in, his shirt a grimy mess and with Morgan close behind. Morgan eyes widened in horror at the sight of the children, his gaze locked on the silent girls. Rossi watched Reid, and he looked triumphant.

_“Someone else? Another person? There were two, weren’t there? The man that burned Aisling, and the man who brought you back.”_

Rossi made a slow kind of groan at the name ‘Aisling’, but Emily was too focused on the scene before her to look, and by the time she tore her eyes away, he was composed.

_“The girl. They don’t let us see her until we’re caught. They scare us and she says we’ll be safe, but instead she takes us to be burned. Like Aisling and Widget.”_

_“Can you tell me what you remember about when Aisling was… burned? I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. I know it hurts. But there are other children who need our help. You can help them.”_

_“No…”_

“Is this a good idea?” Morgan asked, stepped up beside her. “That kid is traumatized.”

“That kid is the key,” Rossi corrected, and lowered Eris onto the arm of a chair, fiddling with a casefile in his hands. “Two unsubs, the man _and_ Amber… we should have known. A victim once, but she’s compliant in this now.”

“Easier to subdue several children with two sets of hands,” Morgan said.

“No.” Emily’s voice was calm, and she took pride in that. “Two unsubs maybe, but only one—the girl, I assume—is snatching the kids. The other is Intercising them, burning their dæmons. So whoever is doing the grabbing has some kind of pull on these kids.”

“Fear,” Rossi said, holding the pamphlet out. “For the street kids, anyway. For the ones who are too focused on surviving to find any appeal in pretty lights or fancy sparklers.”

Morgan glanced at the paper as she took it and unfolded it carefully, skim reading. “And for the town kids?” he asked.

_“Can you remember what it smelled like? The room where your dæmon was.”_

_“Gross. It hurt my nose. Like…”_

_“Like fireworks? Gunpowder?”_

Emily stared at the pamphlet. “Oh crap,” she said, realizing.

_The Outreach program is glad to introduce a new show to raise awareness for children at risk – daytime fireworks! Children love to love these exciting presentations, brought to you by the generous Jeremy Harper, son of the esteemed and dearly missed..._

“Call Hotch,” Reid said, closing the door firmly behind him. “We have a name.”

“Way ahead of you, kiddo,” Rossi said smugly, holding up his phone. “He’s on his way back to the precinct. He wants us ready to move in as soon as Garcia finds us an address.”

“Are you alright?” Emily asked Reid as he moved past her to follow Rossi and the concerned looking Morgan out of the room. “Is Aureilo hurt? You look pale.”

“I’m fine,” Reid said, his eyes glittering oddly. “Aureilo is… scared. Scared and excited. I think. It’s fuzzy, there’s something between us that’s blocking him. But he’s getting clearer like… like he’s moving closer.”

Sergio chirped with surprise. “How is that possible?” he demanded. “Shouldn’t he be getting further away? I mean, this guy isn’t going to be driving around with a kidnapped fed in his trunk.”

“I think,” Reid said, and grinned. A real grin, surprised and a little bit proud. “I think perhaps Aureilo has done something _fantastic_.”

She shouldn’t be surprised, not really. She’d hardly expected anything else from the man, or his dæmon.


	7. Mistress Mary, Quite contrary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mistress Mary, Quite contrary,
> 
> How does your garden grow?
> 
> With Silver Bells, And Cockle Shells,
> 
> And so my garden grows

Eris stayed silent, a heavy, conscious weight on his shoulder, and Rossi smiled warmly at the man sitting across from him. It was his ‘I’m the good cop’ smile. It was saccharine and a little cocky, and an absolute bald-faced lie. There were no good cops in this room if this man was who they thought he was.

“Look,” the man, Richard Wayland, snapped. He shoved the photos of the homeless children they’d regained back at them, his snake dæmon hissing unhappily from around his ankles. “I just run the Buford branch of Outreach. I’m a paper-pusher. I go to some of the events, sure, gotta keep appearances up, but I don’t have contact time with the children. Not much of it, anyway. Those kids don’t want contact time—they want food, somewhere warm to spend a few hours, and something to distract them from how fucking unfair life has been to them.”

“Your job means you travel, yes?” Rossi asked, leaning forward and tugging the map Reid that had traced the suspected path of their unsub on before it had all gone to shit out from the closed case-file. “Your travels ever lead you along a path very much like this one?”

Wayland’s eyes scanned the map, brows knitting together. “Yes…” he said finally, and the snake fell silent. “Wait… yes. This is. This is one of our routes, or really damn close to it. Wait, am I a suspect? Do I need a lawyer? Because you haul me in here and give me a map of our August route—and where the hell did you get that without a warrant?”

Eris’s talons tightened on the reinforced material of his jacket, the leather shoulder-pad protecting his skin from being scored, and she clicked her beak before whispering, “August?”

“This about those missing kids?” The man was rambling now, his eyes darting around. Terrified. Indignant.

Not guilty.

“August?” Rossi checked, and the man nodded jerkily, sweat dropping from his upper lip. “You last ran this route in August? Two months ago?”

“Yes! Look!” Wayland tugged his smartphone from out from his jeans pocket, tapping frantically at it and leaving sweaty streaks across the glass that made the image hop and jump. “It’s here somewhere… ah. Here. Our itinerary. Yeah, sure, I was there for every one of those stops—but it was in August. Those kids only just started getting taken, right? And that was a damn busy trip. Getting winter supplies out to who needs it before the cold sets in, making sure our food supplies are up, plus we we’re trying to get some more programs out into the system for like, fun, ya’know? These kids don’t have much fun.”

Another squeeze on his shoulder. “Programs like this?” Rossi asked, rapping his knuckle on the brochure emblazoned with the daytime fireworks. “What can you tell me about this?”

“Oh, Harper’s thing? Yeah he like… offered it cheap. He’s a local, son of a rich old eccentric. Came to me when we started advertising entertainment and stuff—trying to drum up donations, make people actually give a fuck—and I wasn’t gonna turn that down. Free fireworks? Kids love fireworks, even hungry kids. They’ll sit through all kinds of awful to see some bangs, you know? We did a couple of practise runs and man, the guy is a pyrotechnic _genius_ , and they all ate it up. After word got out, we had them lining up at the bloody door. Some even let us do like… medical checks and stuff. Immunizations. All to see some pretty smoke and fancy lights. August was our trial run. Absolute goddamn success though, let me tell you.”

“He was with you the whole run? This Jeremy Harper?”

“Yeah. After we saw how well it was working, we organized a show in every second city, so he rode along. Would have done more but he makes his own charges and didn’t have enough for that many shows. Been good since then though. Even started doing some fancy shit. All glittery and glowy, the girls love it.”

Behind the one-way mirror taking up the entirety of one wall, Rossi knew Morgan would have leapt into action. Garcia would already be hunting this Harper down, his details winging their way to their cells. They’d be en-route within the hour. Hotch was still processing the sewer. Prentiss and Reid were waiting in the precinct for an address. They were all paused on the brink of action. The empty space in their team screamed at them to _hurry_.

“He was with you the _entire_ run? Did he ever leave your sight? Times when he wasn’t working, perhaps?” Times when he could have scouted the area. Times he could have established a rapport with locals.  

Times he could have hunted.

Wayland fell silent. “I’m a busy man,” he said finally, and his voice had gone cold. “I… he wasn’t there all the time. He… wasn’t there. Did he do… the news. It’s been saying those kids you lot found had their dæmons taken. I didn’t think that was possible, it’s too _fucked_. Did he do this?”

Eris brushed his ear as she swivelled her head around to peer at the glass behind them, communicating silently with a sharp look at his colleague. “What kind of a man is Jeremy Harper?” Rossi asked calmly, not letting any of the thrumming excitement pulsing through his veins show in his face. _So close. We’re coming JJ._

Wayland stared back, his face tinged green and red, disgusted and furious beyond reason now. Rossi could see him thinking of what the children had gone through, running that against his knowledge of the man. “Cold,” he said finally, fingers clenching. “He’s cold.”

 

* * *

 

JJ’s mind whirred. Everything she knew, everything she’d learned with the team, it was all culminating in this moment. Staying alive, staying whole, and going home to her family. But only if she saved the kids as well. She wasn’t leaving this place without them, not now she knew they were here. She wished Aureilo was still with her. Not even half an hour had passed since she’d last seen the cocky hare, and the horrible way he’d shrieked and fallen when the blade had slashed between them haunted her. Laying still, on his side, flanks heaving and nose flaring red: she couldn’t shake the image from her mind.

“My dæmon,” she stammered, and didn’t have to pretend to stumble. Her arms and legs were sluggish. Still sore and numb from being tied in such a grotesque position and her head beating a throbbing tempo of pain that radiated from the base of her neck outwards, she wasn’t _thinking_ clearly enough. “I need to see him also. After the children. So I know that I am truly free of him.”

The man rolled his shoulders, his neck popping cheek shifting as he chewed at the inside of it. The hand in hers was rough, the nails worn to ragged stumps, the skin of his wrist scratched and clawed at. She could see similar signs of worrying on his mouth, his lips scabbed and bloody. “The beast is no more,” he said finally, resolutely, and everything went very quiet after that.

Quiet and hazy.

She followed.

She didn’t think. Couldn’t think.

She thought too much.

> “Please don’t let them take him away again.”
> 
> “Spence, no. No, no… we’re not ever going to let that happen again. Not ever. I promise.”

She’d held him, pressing her mouth into his hair as he trembled against her. Crying, the both of them. In that tiny hospital room where everyone had expected him to die, he’d survived.

Aureilo curled against them both, ears flat against his spine and eyes wide. “Never again,” he’d chanted, shaking his head. “I thought we’d die.”

She felt him twitch in her arms, his breath hot and damp against her throat. “I wanted to die,” he’d admitted softly, so softly, so hopelessly. “I tried to.” And she’d promised to protect him.

She’d failed.

“We’re here,” growled a voice by her ear, and someone shook her arm. She looked up, slowly, and stared at the man. _What?_ “The ones who need to be saved. You should show them what they can become.” A door. A solid door. It groaned as he unlocked it and ushered her in. A wave of heat and stink rolled out at her and made her eyes water and her stomach pinch horridly.

She walked in and found herself looking down at a huddle of children and dæmons, countless eyes all blinking up at her. She counted anyway, her mind shuddering awake and turning away from Reid and his hare and her heart and the loss of them all. Eight. Eight children. All with dæmons. All relying on her.

Just like Spence had.

She took a deep breath and looked down into the closest eyes, ignoring the wave of whimpers and sniffles that ran through the group. Filthy, most of them. Filthy, skinny, cornered. And two who stood out with their cleanliness and their cockiness. Or, not cockiness. Just… confidence. They didn’t cower like the other six, they stood and stared back—almost challengingly, almost pleadingly. They, unlike the others, still hadn’t given up hope that adults would protect them.

“I want to go home,” said Kayla Chant, her dæmon a tabby cat that spat and hissed. “Please?”

JJ looked at her and tried to reassure her with her eyes and the smile that she knew slipped oddly across her face, but the girl’s face turned uncertain, worried. _Henry, Henry,_ murmured half her mind. _Reid’s dead_ , screamed a larger half. The largest part yet pointed out that, _there’s eight here to save. Two that you know are still missing. Where are they? Get your head in the game. Save them._

“Where are the ones who have been cleansed?” she asked, and hated the coldness in her voice as three of the children began to cry and a ripple of movement passed across the rest as they pressed in tighter, their dæmons shifting as big and scary as they could. Another spitting cat, a half-grown lion cub, a hawk that bared its beak and _screee’d_. A moth that flapped anxiously around its girl’s head.

A moth.

Henry’s dæmon loved being a moth.

“Separate rooms,” the man said from behind her. “I keep the animals together. Like a flock. Together in their filth.”

“And the… beasts? The beasts that you take from them?” With difficultly, the hardest thing she’d ever done, she turned her back on that group of terrified, desperate children and looked at him, forcing another smile. This one was easier because they _relied_ on it. She smiled like a knife, bladed and dangerous, and he couldn’t tell.

His nails scratched monotonously at his arm, eyes blinking rapidly. Devolving. Mentally ill, and devolving. She wasn’t in the mind to bet, but if she was, she’d have put money on him being off whatever medication he was supposed to be on. Maybe had been off it for months. His hare paced in a wobbly line up the hall, eyes unfocused and skittering. She’d pace, stop, itch. Pace, stop itch. In the dusty light, JJ could see fine fur scattering into the air when her paws bit at her skin and coat. Despite everything, despite her anger and her torment, she grieved this man and his dæmon and the people they could have been without madness taking them by the hand and leading them away from the world.

“I can show you,” he said finally, his hand pausing. _Skitch, skitch,_ went the hare’s hind leg on her shoulder, and JJ saw blood. “I can… come on. Come on.”

The door closed behind her; she heard a wail and hardened her heart. _I’ll come back,_ she screamed silently. There were no lights. No lights in that cell, not when the door was shut, a tiny airless cage with eight children and their souls trapped within. _As soon as I can. I’ll be back._

And she followed again. The hare’s path grew more erratic.

They were in danger, so much danger. Kailo was silent, frightened, and they were in danger. This man was breaking, snapping, something was giving way, and they were all in the path of it. Some small part of her was expecting Aureilo to be there when the man opened a heavy door that screamed in protest as he heaved it open and descended the stone steps. Some small part knew there’d be horror, but it was also expecting Aureilo, because she wasn’t taking a madman’s word that he was gone.

But there was no Aureilo. There was nothing. Just a bank of empty cages. A ground that crunched underfoot and glittered in the light. The man stopped and stared, and JJ smiled for real. Smiled at the cages, all of them open or torn or toppled, and the broken window.

_Clever hare,_ she thought, closing her eyes as the man began screaming.

 

* * *

 

“Hello, my gorgeous. Any word?”

Morgan smiled wearily at Garcia’s bobbing head on the grainy screen, Tupelo’s beak taking up a full corner of the cam as he hopped about anxiously. “We’ve got some leads. We’ll get her back, Pen—both of them.”

His friend beamed, and they both ignored the misery hidden in that bright smile or the tears that her neon glasses barely concealed. “Of course you will,” she said firmly, tapping on Tupelo’s beak with a fluffy pen to scoot him out of the way before doing the same to the camera. “Don’t you dare go getting all tied up in doubts, Derek Gorgeous Morgan, or I’ll fly there myself and prove it to you. JJ is probably sitting around in this awful… _person’s_ … house, eating ice cream and waiting for you guys to swoop in and ‘save’ her. You just have to do your part.”

Thank mercy for Penelope Garcia. It was impossible to let himself sink too low into his own head when she was around. “I gotcha, Babygirl. Anything new for us?”

“Perhaps. Nothing that’s going to lead you to this guy—you’re waiting on whatever Rossi walks out of that interview with, according to our esteemed Boss—but I have this. Your little girl? Ally McDonald. Pictured here with her now-divorced parents back when they were somewhat happy, and her brother. Jack McDonald. Little cutie, isn’t he?”

Morgan stared at the photo and his gut lurched horribly. The picture was old. Ally was, what? Six? Maybe seven? The girl in the photo was an infant, held in the arms of a blonde-haired blue-eyed toddler who beamed at the photographer with his two front teeth barely showing. A rat hung from his shoulder, the barest tuft of fur from the bundled form of the baby suggesting her dæmon sleeping cosily next to her.

Morgan didn’t recognise that smile, because he’d never seen the kid smile, but he had a horrible suspicion he recognised the kid. Add five years and some height and weight, and then remove that weight and add dirt and fear… fuck.

He thought maybe Rossi already knew.

“Any other pictures of them?” he asked huskily, and Garcia’s eyes narrowed. He knew she wouldn’t ask. When they looked this worried, she’d never ask. Some things were better off not known.

“Not any recent ones,” she replied. “I’ve got nothing on the kids’ dæmons’ names, but I do have Mom’s death records—cancer, bankrupted Dad—and I’ve got the spiralling remains of Dad’s life. Then nothing. Bank foreclosed on the house, he quit his job to look after Mom… then he takes the kids and naught. Nadda. I’m now looking up John Does fitting his description, since by every account there aren’t any adults down in those tunnels. Just a bunch of scared and hungry kiddos. Derek. Are you okay?”

The change in subject was abrupt enough that Morgan was pulled away from his steady focus on the fax machine churning out a copy of the family photo for him. They’d have to take it to the hospital… see if his suspicions were right. He blinked, looked at the screen, and was saved from answering by his dæmon rearing up with her chunky white paws on the desk and laughing croakily.

“Why wouldn’t we be?” Naemaria demanded, looking anything but okay with her hackles up and her tail stiff and low between her legs. “Aureilo’s gone, JJ’s been kidnapped by a guy who knows how to _Intercise_ people, we’re surrounded by awful bullshit we can’t fix even if we muzzle this jackass…”

“Naemaria!” Morgan scolded, knocking her off the table by her shoulder and nudging her away. Garcia’s lip wobbled. _Damnit_. “Ah hell, Pen. We’re fine. We’re focused. Give us eight hours and we’ll have them back and this will all be a distant memory.” _Except for Ally. Except for Jack. Except for all those kids we pulled outta those tunnels._

“And Reid?” Garcia said, ignoring the wobble to her chin to try and look determined again. “Rossi dobbed you in. He said you guys are being stupid with each other again. Derek, Reid can’t help who he is and neither can Aureilo. You have to accept that and stop… doing whatever it is you’re doing. Projecting.”

He chuckled darkly. “You a profiler now? Learning by osmosis? We going to have to start bringing you out into the field to show us all up?”

“You know I would. Promise me you’ll talk to Reid? His dæmon’s gone, he’s probably scared and angry and hurting. Talk to him. Be there for him. Maybe you’ll get your head on straight by doing so.” It was the closest to a proper telling off he’d ever gotten from her, and he paid her the respect she deserved by not dismissing it out of hand. For Rossi to have gone to Garcia meant the man was worried—for Garcia to put aside her reservations about meddling meant she was _terrified_ of this breach in their team.

And… well, after seeing what it looked like for a person to truly be without a dæmon… Aureilo and Reid didn’t seem half as bad in comparison. More like Morgan was thanking anyone who’d listen that they’d gotten this much of his friend back, instead of… the alternative.

“I promise,” he said, and Garcia sighed with almost audible relief.

The door creaked as it opened behind him and Morgan smiled as Garcia tried to crane her head around the screen to peer past him. “Jeremy Harper,” Rossi barked, striding up next to them and glaring down at the IT wizard, positively vibrating with tension. Eris sat on his shoulder, coiled like a spring with her wings almost open, and Morgan understood that because Naemaria stood by the door with her tail rigid and eyes fixed forward.

Ready, the both of them. This was ending today.

“We were just talking about you, sir,” Garcia said with forced cheer, smiling tightly. “Good things, of course, while my babies do their thing and find out everything there is to know about creepy firework man. And oh man, is he creepy. And fireworky. And… well, creepy.”

“Father died eight months ago,” Morgan said, glancing at Rossi. “Right about when the coroners date the first bodies they pulled outta those tunnels.” Those tunnels that he’d be fucking revisiting night after night after night, long after they put this guy away.

“That’s a stressor,” Rossi agreed, leaning over the table and the neat sheaf of papers that were steadily pumping out of the fax machine from Garcia’s busily searching hands. “Father was rich, had his fingers in every pie in the city according to these records. Most of which got passed onto his son upon his death. Mother was… _oh_.”

“Historian focusing on the fall of the Magisterium,” Morgan finished, seeing Garcia swallow hard on the grainy screen. “With a special focus on Coulter and the Snatchers. Intercision, Rossi. She studied Intercision. Died seven years ago after vanishing off the face of the earth for ten years prior, but what’s the bet she left all her research up in her big ol’ house on the hill.”

“The big ol’ house on the hill that was left to none other than Jeremy Harper upon his father’s death,” Garcia piped in. “But hey, something hinky. She literally dropped off the face of the earth. Up and quit a career she was _excelling_ in—Reid level excelling. Everything I find on her suggests that she was a genius in her field. Went back to her home, ignored all calls, spoke to no one. Not a peep until her husband reported her death. Want to know the other hinky thing? Because this family is the hinkiest.”

“What?” Rossi asked, his eyes glittering. “Come on woman, JJ’s waiting for us.”

“Anton Harper,” Garcia finished, tapping her keyboard. The fax machine whirred, spitting out another document after beeping loudly at them. “The youngest son. The mother isn’t the only one they hid away.”

 

* * *

 

Emily sprinted out into the parking lot on the heels of her team, Sergio on her shoulder. “Oi,” the cat said suddenly, claws slipping on her vest. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Lurch?” Turning, she found herself face to face with Reid’s determined expression. She knew that particular set of his chin. _Damnit._

“No,” she said, and folded her arms. “Not happening. Hotch will _shoot_ you if you try. Or I will. I swear I will, right in the di—”

“I’m coming,” Reid said firmly, trying to push past her. She centred herself, immovable, and Spencer Reid would rather shoot _himself_ in the junk before shoving a woman. She could tell he was tempted though. “Emily, I have to come. I can feel Aureilo—that will get stronger as we get closer. I can lead you straight to him. You don’t know what it’s like to have your dæmon move away from you. I’m always conscious, always aware—he’s only a thought away.”

There was a whine in his voice, a desperate breathy pitch, and she thought part of his issue might have been the hours ticking away between now and when he’d last laid eyes on his soul. For all that they pretended to be so separate—for all that Morgan thought them so different—Reid and his hare were irrevocably entwined. They needed each other just as badly as she needed Sergio.

Morgan would see that too, one day.

“Reid.” Hotch. Not-happy-Hotch. Emily stepped back and let it play out as it would. Reid turned an expression onto Hotch that took Emily’s breath away. It was _need_. Desperate crushing need, and he didn’t try to bullshit.

“You’re going to him,” he whispered, and his eyes were so impossibly wide and broken. “Please, Aaron. I can’t wait any longer. I _need_ my dæmon. _Please_.”

 

* * *

 

Jeremy Harper’s cell placed him in the woods. Wayland’s information told them he was almost certainly at a small range where he would test his new charges in solitude. Relative solitude. Hotch didn’t need to be Reid to see that the range that the man used was barely a half hour walk from the opening of the sewer system—not so far that a bored child wouldn’t creep over to watch a free show. Maybe chat with the man doing so. Maybe be coaxed closer with food or more fireworks. Maybe coaxed into his vehicle.

Hal snarled and turned on the backseat, and Hotch saw Reid almost jolt out of his skin. When he glanced sideways at the man, something uncomfortable settled into his gut. The man was always moving, always thinking, but now his movements—constant, erratic movements—were aimless. Reid was many things, but very rarely aimless.

“Reid,” Hotch said firmly, because he knew it was a mistake to bring him and this was proving him right. He’d allowed his relief at having him back at their side to soothe him into bringing him along, and it was a mistake. Reid didn’t answer, flicking hair out of his eyes and biting at his lip with his front teeth. “Reid!”

“What?” Reid’s attention snapped to him, intensely focused, and Hotch eyed the sheen of sweat over his forehead and the clammy pallor to his skin. “Hotch, I can feel him.”

The worry vanished. “Aureilo?”

A feverish nod answered him. “Yes. Yes… he’s. Closer. Getting closer. I just need to… focus on him and I can’t, I can’t focus.” Agile fingers flickered in his lap as he rubbed them together before lifting them and carding them though his hair and leaving it a tussled mess. “I don’t know why I can’t focus, but I can’t.”

Reid sensing Aureilo meant that they were almost certainly on the right track. They needed to expect anything.

“Disarm,” Hotch said sharply, and Reid turned wide, hurt eyes onto him. He ignored them. It was his job to keep his team safe and alive—even if that meant pissing them off. “Now, Reid. Disarm and leave your weapon locked in the glove compartment. You’re ill.”

“I’m not—” Reid responded, his mouth turning down unhappily, but Hotch wasn’t done.

“Aureilo’s ill,” he corrected himself, and Reid fell silent. He wouldn’t blatantly lie, not to Hotch. If he thought it would help the team, he’d hide information, but he wouldn’t lie. “Aureilo is ill and that’s inhibiting your ability to focus and work. I can’t have you in the firing line like this. I need you disarmed and out of the way until Harper is contained—understood?”

“Sir,” Reid agreed miserably, closing his eyes. Hotch glanced at him again. His eyelids were shadows against white skin, purple and sore looking. Like bruises. Exhausted and ill and definitely going straight back to the hospital as soon as they’d retrieved his dæmon. Even as Hotch looked at him, his hand dropped back and pressed gingerly against his stomach, sucking in a sharp breath and twitching as though biting back a gasp.

Lights flickered ahead. Rossi, drawing his vehicle up slowly into park alongside a bank of trees. They had to be careful. If they alerted Harper, there were a million and one places he could vanish to in this forest. Hotch parked just as silently, killing the motor. Checking his gun, checking his baton, checking for the extendable mirror in his breast pocket. Radio. Cell. Gun, again. Then he turned back to Reid.

“Stay in the car until I say otherwise,” he reaffirmed, and Reid nodded slowly. Then he looked at Hal, and made a choice he hoped to god he wouldn’t regret. “Stay with him.” Hal and Reid made identical noises of shock, but he’d lost two team members today—even if only temporarily—and he wasn’t in the state of mind to leave any of them alone. Not yet. Possibly not for a while.

“Okay,” Hal said finally, folding her ears back to express her displeasure. “Stay safe, Aaron.”

For the first time, Aaron Hotchner stepped out of the car and walked towards a confrontation alone, with no wolf at his side.

 

* * *

 

He’d fully intended on listening to Hotch. He’d _absolutely_ intended upon listening to Hotch. Even without Hal lurking like a furry, intimidating canine angel over his shoulder, he’d have stayed in the car, but intentions rarely ever worked out how they were… well, intended.

A crack echoed over the forest and Hal jolted and made a strangled kind of almost-whine that had his body turning cold in seconds, except for the pooling heat in his back and abdomen that had been steadily building for the last three hours and taking with it his ability to breathe.

“Who?” Reid asked, his voice hitching with both nervousness and fear, and Hal shook her coat out.

“None of us,” she said as coolly as if she hadn’t jumped. “None of ours down. Aaron is calm.”

But Reid was barely listening because his heart was hammering, hammering, hammering, jack-rabbiting almost, and it wasn’t his fear, wasn’t his, and he could _feel_ where it was coming from.

Another crack. Gunshot. Reid jerked against the seatbelt. It snapped tight against his chest and stole his air and he fumbled at the button, released it, buckled forward around the jabbing, stabbing, pinching pain. _Renal trauma. 3% of all trauma admissions are renal. 85-90% of renal injuries are caused by blunt trauma—like a boot. A boot. You felt the boot when it hit him._

“Reid?” said a deep voice that drummed through his spiralling thoughts. “Spencer?”

_The kidney is the most commonly damaged organ in the urinary system._

_But you already knew it as soon as you starting pissing blood, and still you’re here._

“Spencer!” A damp, heavy nose butted against his ear and some part of Reid knew that Hotch would have stopped at that touch, might even be turning back to the car now with worry overwhelming him, but a larger part of him was in a dark place, trapped, hurting, and not alone.

_Over there._

Another crack and he heard it twice. Through two sets of ears.

He lifted his head and stared at the wolfdog. “I know where Aureilo is,” he said calmly, and then threw himself at the door and out the car before she could squeeze through the seats to stop him.

_This way._

And he was running, limping really, but he pushed through the pain—and _fuck_ there was pain and his dæmon wasn’t at his side and horribly, horribly, he knew he’d felt this before—and kept running, jogging around the dusty road curling against the forest towards that steady thrumming awareness of self. His hand skimmed over his hip. Empty. Gun in the car. Paws drummed up behind him but he didn’t stop and she didn’t ask him to.

_I’m here._

His throat and nose burned with the memory of the scent of offal. When he turned his head to look at her, he fancied he heard a revolver cocking and the hammer clicking into an empty chamber. _Choose._

_Come find me._

> _Don’t leave me._

“Where is he?” Hal barked, and Reid turned his head again, like a pointer, an arrow to his heart, and she sprinted forward. “Aureilo!” It was a howl, both to call for the dæmon and to alert the team. He followed, ignoring the dark haze building at the corner of his vision.

Every step was an effort. Sweat dripped down his back, sticking his shirt to him and flapping grossly against his skin.

One step. Two. And another. One after that.

Keep going.

> _Choose one to die._
> 
> _“Me. I choose myself. Kill me.”_

He was being dragged into the dark. He stumbled, one knee collapsing bonelessly under him, and felt the gravel bite into his leg. It didn’t really hurt, despite the blood that came away when he ran his fingers over it.

Get up. Another step. Don’t throw up. Don’t pass out.

> _Choose._

Barking. Wolves don’t bark.

> _Hal’s not a wolf. Wolfdog. Domestic vs. the wild._
> 
> _“Profiling the Hotchman, Reid?”_

He reached out and his hand pressed against the cool surface of… he blinked. A van. Hal next to him, slamming her front paws against the rear door and barking, barking, shouting.

> _I’m not the reason we’re lonely._

“Aureilo?” he called, tugging ineffectually at the handle and feeling it give slightly under his weak grip. He was leaning against the van, almost sliding down, and there were so many fucking voices in his head he couldn’t think.

> _No. Not entirely. But you’re a big part of it._

The door opened and his hare was there, throwing himself into Reid’s arms with a sob and sending them both crashing to the ground. Reid curled around him, making sure he was real. Was real and here and alive. His hands wrapped around a narrow chest, pulling him close, closing their eyes.

He had a momentarily glimpse of Hal nudging a kitten with its mouth wide open in a terrified scream, and Emily leaning over him, and then nothing but the knowledge of the dæmon in his arms.

_Not lonely._

_Never lonely._

“Never again,” gasped the hare, and then they let themselves fall together.


	8. Ring a Ring o' Roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
> 
> A pocket full of posies;
> 
> Ashes! Ashes!
> 
> We all fall down.

Hotch motioned silently for them to circle the man, and they did so without a single hesitation. They’d been working together long enough that just the barest flicker of their leader’s hand was enough to have them shifting into position, eyes and ears and weapons ready.

Rossi paced behind Prentiss, watching as her eyes narrowed and she effortlessly slipped through the shadows. Sergio vanished into the trees above, Prentiss’s eyes and ears in the canopy, and when she focused Rossi could see the cat on her features. She moved like a cat too. Easy and dangerous, and he smiled at that. Eris swept from his shoulder and vanished with only the slightest ruffle of feathers. His own eyes and ears, and she guided him as faultlessly as she always had and always would. He followed that steady thrumming link between them without a second thought, because she’d never steer him wrong. He knew that Morgan had gone the other way, Naemaria’s nose his guide, and Hotch was on point, alone.

Alone. That terrified him. He understood _why_ the man had left Hal with Reid, but it still worried him. He wasn’t Morgan, it didn’t freak him out, but… there was a dangerous man in these woods and none of them were solitary hunters.

“Jeremy Harper?” called a steady voice, and Rossi stepped out of the trees to find Harper with his back to him, facing Hotch. “Drop your weapon. Get on the ground, hands behind your back. Now.” Hotch’s weapon didn’t waver. Neither did Harper’s. Rossi aimed his own, ignoring the kick-jump of terror that tried to wobble his hand at the sight of the barrel aimed securely at his friend’s chest. The shot was easy, the man barely five feet away standing next to a muddy trolley and a collection of boxes. The boxes made it riskier. Rossi wasn’t super keen to fire anywhere near those boxes, especially with a friendly in his line of sight. _Move your ass to the left, Aaron._

“Who are you?” called Harper, his finger teetering painfully close to the shotgun trigger. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I have a permit.”

Morgan and Naemaria appeared, their expressions identical except for the ridge of fur along Naemaria’s spine as her hackles bristled. She growled and Harper’s dæmon reared and whistled angrily at the dog. Canine: short, red coated, and with its fluffy black-tipped tail held high… Rossi couldn’t place the damn thing. It whistled again and stepped forward, closer to Naemaria. She didn’t even flinch.

“Drop your weapon and we’ll talk.” Hotch’s gaze didn’t waver. Rossi edged sideways, silently, just in case. He wondered where Emily was. He needed to know before taking a shot. There was a flicker of shadow overhead and he quickly gestured to his side, low and out of sight of the rest of his team. Not out of sight to his owl though. Four fingers followed by an open palm. _Team position?_ Eris would do the rest.

“Okay,” Harper said, almost polite, and Rossi immediately didn’t trust that. “I’m just going to put this down…” Lowering himself slowly, but his hands were still near the trigger and there was a soft rush of displaced air over Rossi’s head right as the shot cleared and Hotch moved ever so slightly out of the way.

Harper spun and fired over Rossi’s head. He couldn’t help the jolt backwards at first or, barely a second later, the rushing roaring of blood in his ears as his adrenaline spiked. Eris screamed, high and angry as the shot barely missed her. She swept upwards, out of easy range, and Rossi groaned with pain as their link stretched.

Morgan fired, Hotch shouted, and Rossi roared, “Watch the charges!” as Harper hit the dirt between the trolley and crates. Then he sprinted forward. One more shot—Hotch’s? Giving cover. Distracting the asshole’s attention. Where was Emily?

_You fucking jagoff dare shoot at my owl,_ he thought furiously, glancing up to where Eris wheeled overhead. She looked at him, tipped her wing to the right, and he went left. “Oi,” he snapped, and before Harper could wiggle around on his belly like a worm to aim the gun at him, he put his boot between the guy’s shoulder-blades and slammed him into the dirt. His dæmon went down seconds later, Naemaria grabbing her by the ruff and shaking her into placidity. Rossi ground his heel in, just a little. “Not so nice when it’s your dæmon, is it?” he hissed softly. Harper didn’t respond. He couldn’t, not with a face full of dirt. Like a fucking _worm_.

Good.

Hotch strode up, crouching to cuff the guy. “Glove up and muzzle her,” he said to Morgan, who nodded and turned to walk to the car to get the canid muzzle. Satisfaction pooled in Rossi’s gut, warm and delicious, at the muck smeared on Harper’s face when Hotch dragged him up by his arm from under Rossi’s boot. The man spat dirt, avoiding eye-contact with them both, and there was mud in-between his teeth. _Hah._

Eris dived and for a wild second Rossi thought she was going for him. “Reid’s out the car,” she called, moments before Hotch twitched and spun, eyes unfocused and wild. A howl echoed over the trees.

“Fucking _knew_ he wouldn’t stay fucking put,” Rossi snarled. “Morgan! Sit!” Morgan’s face was a picture as Hotch and Rossi both piss-bolted past him, leaving him with the cuffed Harper and the still being-salivated-on-weird-dog-thing. Rossi made a mental note to chuckle over that later. After they recaptured their own little wayward agent and perhaps muzzled _him_. At the very least, they were buying a leash.

“Where?” he called, but Hotch was already moving faster than Rossi had thought the man capable, in an unerring straight line, and it occurred to him then that Hal and Hotch’s range was a fuckton larger than either of them had ever hinted at.

Eris whirled overhead, gliding easily through the trees mere inches above Rossi’s hair, her wingspan wide enough to cast him into shadow. “Prentiss is already there,” she informed them. “Hal is one o’clock from here.”

Useful. Rossi ducked a branch that Eris swept over, jumped a log to her soft laugh, and burst out into a dusty parking lot, and chaos. Hal danced in front of them on her hind legs, speaking at a mile a minute, Emily was crouched over a prone Reid—a prone Reid who was seriously getting a kick up the ass for this—and there was a cheerfully painted van with a truly remarkable amount of dæmons either huddled inside or tumbling out of it.

“What the fuck,” Rossi deadpanned, holstering his gun and striding towards his first priority. “Prentiss, what’s Reid’s status?” They turned to look at him and Rossi had time to notice the tears on Reid’s flushed cheeks and the relief on Prentiss’s moments before spotting the shivering, gasping, bundle of fur wrapped so tightly in Reid’s arms he couldn’t tell where profiler ended and hare began. Sergio was between the two of them, poking his nose through Reid’s fingers to try and bump against the hare, purring furiously.

“Better,” Emily answered instead, smiling crookedly, and curled her hand under Reid’s head to stop it from hitting the gravel as his eyes closed. “It’s mostly shock I think. I already radioed for a medic.”

“Aureilo,” whispered Eris, more of a sigh, and she landed on his shoulder. “Dave, those dæmons…”

He looked at them then. Hal was already there, low to the ground to make herself smaller and talking in a low, soothing voice. The dæmons whimpered and clustered, edging closer to Hal like they were magnetised to her. The wolfdog laid down on her belly, stretched out her nose, and whined. It was a low, sad noise, and the dæmons flocked to it. Rossi watched her nuzzling a kitten lovingly, the kitten crying out once before curling against her chest and closing its eyes, and his heart broke just a little.

“They’re Intercised, Dave,” Hotch murmured, his skin ashen. “Look at them.”

He’d known that within seconds of spotting them. Their colours were faded, fur lank and eyes dull. None of them moved with purpose. They all cried for their humans. They were ghosts, ghosts that hadn’t realized that they were dead and gone yet.

“Yeah,” he said finally, heavily, and lay his hand on Hotch’s shoulder, feeling the strain through the man’s vest. “But they’re safe now. Aureilo kept them safe.”

If only they could say the same about JJ.

 

* * *

 

Harper clammed up as soon as they got him into the interrogation room. Hotch had expected that. Actually, after taking a look at the man’s tailored (albeit, muddy) clothes and expensive watch, Hotch had expected him to lawyer up. What he hadn’t expected was for man and dæmon to very quietly and determinedly return Hotch’s stare without even flinching. The dhole—as Reid had murmured in between arguing the need for an ambulance—barely sat to Hal’s chest in height but wasn’t intimidated in the least. Quite the opposite in fact. The dhole stared at Hal like she was a puzzle the smaller canid very much wanted to work out. It was… disconcerting.

Hotch had spent his adult life dealing with disconcerting. He wasn’t thrown in the least.

“Kayla Chant,” Hotch said, sliding the photo across the table. “Jessie Nielsen. Conner McKay” Each name was a photo, a life. “Where are they?”

Harper’s gaze didn’t waver. Just unblinkingly stared back into Hotch’s eyes. Two could play at that game. The dhole shook her head, the links of the muzzle rattling gently.

Hotch leaned forward. He didn’t smile. They’d been in here for two hours already and time was clicking forward far too quickly. “Agent Jareau. My agent. You have her. Where is she?”

“Have you ever stretched your link with…” Harper’s words were sudden and shocking in the enclosed room where only Hotch’s voice had been heard so far. “Hal, I believe I heard you refer to her as. Hal. Is that shortened? What’s her true name?”

“Is this relevant?” Hotch kept his voice cool. “Why would I choose to answer your questions when you won’t answer mine?”

“Mine are more pertinent to the topic at hand.” Harper smiled, and the hair on the back on Hotch’s neck stood on end. Hal shifted, her paws making the barest hint of noise on the cool floor.

“The topic is my agent and the missing children. You’re going to tell me where they are, Harper. You do understand the repercussions of taking a federal agent alone will be severe. Any assistance you can offer at this point will be essential to any appeals you may make in the future.”

Harper laughed. It was a jackal bark, sharp and from the chest. It was the kind of laugh that echoed out of the dark and made mothers draw their young close. “Agent Hotchner, what is happening to your agent is hardly going to impact my sentence. I’ll be facing the death penalty. How many children have you found? However many, I take responsibility for them all. All their deaths, the deaths of their dæmons. Their… Intercisions. I’ll even tell you where to find more. And maybe where your agent is. But please, answer my question. Humour me. It’s the least you can do after the old man dug his boot into my spine.”

“Never,” Hotch answered bluntly. He’d never tested the true distance of their link. He had no need.

Wide grey-green eyes wavered, finally, for the first time, and look down almost hungrily at Hal. “Never? You’ve never been without her? Oh… interesting. Her true name. Do tell me.”

It was simple. Humour him and get his agent home.

It tasted like betrayal; betrayal of his very self.

“Halaimon.”

_“Halaimon_.” Harper purred it, and Hotch couldn’t tell if the shudder of unease that worked its way up his spine was his or Hal’s, or both. “Gorgeous. She’s gorgeous. People are so fascinated with children’s dæmons, so… intrigued by them. I find the opposite. Settled dæmons have such an ease around them. They don’t deserve to be shackled to us like they are. Their freedom… would you give it to her if she wanted it? Would you cut her free to be her own creature? To speak with whomever she wants? To go wherever she pleases? To be… _touched_ … by anyone she wishes.”

His hands twitched on the table, minutely, as though he was imagining his own fingers threading through Hal’s thick coat, and Hotch’s gut lurched. He didn’t show the horror or disgust at the thought of it, but inwardly his stomach and throat burned with bile and he breathed slowly and carefully to ease the burn away before he spoke again. “Is that what you like? Cutting away dæmons for your own perversions?”

“Very much so, Agent Hotchner. Unfortunately, the hare was a little feistier than I expected when I restrained him, I’m afraid he and his human were quite unconscious in the short time we spent together. She’s very pretty. I would have liked to see her respond to my hands on him. It’s an exquisite kind of pleasure, the sharing of dæmons.”

Hotch didn’t respond, not immediately. Harper was… goading. The words he was using, the phrases, his tone… all designed to get under Hotch’s skin. To horrify and disturb him. Harper had already shown an age preference towards the young girl—it wasn’t impossible that he would confess an attraction to JJ, there were superficial similarities in appearance, but…

His confession. His complete and instant acceptance of his capture. Why?

He switched track. “Anton Harper.”

They all saw the tremor that ran through the other man’s body at the name. Skin paling, so slightly, Harper stared at him again and licked his lip nervously. “My brother,” he said finally. “My… dead… brother. He fell, when we were kids.”

“The state has no record of his death.”

“Because my parents hid it. They ‘home-schooled’ him. No one questioned us—not the Harper’s. Not the ‘esteemed’ Jacob Harper. I was home-schooled too, and mother was a recluse. People talked. People do very little else. No one knew my brother died, and no one cared. They buried him in the grounds. I used to go and pray for him. Sometimes… he even listened.”

That didn’t make sense. There was so much concealed here, so much being left unsaid, and the clock was still ticking. _What is happening to your agent…_ what _is_ happening…

Is. Present tense.

They didn’t have time for his sordid history, not yet. After they’d found her.

“Agent Hotchner, you look tense. Worried about Agent Jareau? I did say I would tell you where she is. Eventually.”

Buying time. He was trying to distract them to buy time. “In return for?”

“Let me touch Halaimon.”

Hotch’s heart stopped. It gave one galloping thump and then paused, halting on the brink of nothing. He was staring, staring still, but this time he wasn’t doing it to profile or intimidate. It was shock, nothing else.

The fixed calm between them was shattered by his dæmon.

Hal leapt to her feet and _snarled_ , vicious and hungry and cruel, and even Harper shrunk back. She was a solid wall of black fur and muscle, her hackles pulled back to reveal long fangs that snapped shut on the air, and she looked wild. Wild and completely unapproachable. Hotch felt her fury burn through him.

The door slammed open, banging against the wall just behind Hal’s stiff tail, and Rossi stormed in. “Right, interview over,” he said with a furious kind of calm. “We’ve got your address and a warrant, Harper. We’re going to tear your sordid little world apart and then you’re never going to see daylight again, got it? Agent Hotchner, with me.”

Hotch followed numbly without a single look back at the man cuffed to the table. His laugh followed them before the door closed between them. “She’s not there, Agent Hotchner. Nothing there but remnants of my brother. And you’ll be far too late to save her.”

“Dave,” Hotch said quietly to his friend’s back as soon as the laugh faded and they were out of earshot of anyone listening. “That was unnecessary.”

“Bullfuckingshit it was,” Rossi barked, whirling on him. “You were tempted.”

Hal choked back another growl, still on edge. Her ears snapped back against her skull, eyes ringed in white and the pupils pinpoints of horror. “I wasn’t,” Hotch reassured her, before turning back to Rossi. “Jesus, Dave. No I wasn’t.”

“Aaron…” Rossi shook his head, looking nothing but weary now. Outside, the sun was dipping over the horizon. Almost night. JJ had been gone for over twelve hours now. They were all exhausted. “There’s not a thing you wouldn’t give up for this team. Not a single thing. If you thought it would get us one inch closer to finding her, you’d offer yourself up on a silver platter with an apple in Hal’s mouth. You lot need saving from yourselves half the time.”

He wasn’t… completely wrong.

“Are you so different?” Hotch asked, his voice a murmur, and Rossi’s mouth kinked into a wry smile.

“Not so much,” he admitted. “Come on. We actually do have an address and warrant. You drive—I’ll call Morgan and get him to meet us there; he’s at the hospital with Reid.”

Hotch went to follow, but a small voice stopped him. “Aaron?” When he looked down, Hal’s eyes were dark and worried. Guilt instantly assailed him. She was his everything, and Rossi was right—for the barest second, he’d considered it. She knew this. “If it comes to it…”

“It won’t,” Hotch promised her. “I won’t let it.”

 

* * *

 

Morgan waited until Reid had vanished into an alternate room with the grim-faced doctor and his maned wolf dæmon, and then found his way to the nightmarish room that contained everything they were fighting against with this case. Naemaria was silent. The nurses clustered in tight groups through the muted corridors of the DICU, every topic of whispered conversation focused on the room of humanless dæmons silently fading away. In his pocket, the photo burned.

The room was silent. And empty. Only one occupant. Morgan stopped in the observation room and closed his eyes. A nurse stepped through from the interior room, and paused when she saw him. “The girls?” Morgan asked, opening his eyes again and looking at the huddled shape of the boy in the armchair by the window.

“Passed on, painlessly,” the nurse said. “He’s doing… better. Subjectively speaking. His vital signs are all still quite strong.”

“Do you think he’ll live?” Morgan asked, perhaps bluntly. The nurse’s mouth twitched downwards, and he regretted it.

“I think he’ll very likely survive,” she said finally, bustling out as she replied. “He’s stubborn enough to make a go of it… for what it’s worth.” And she was gone, her tabby cat dæmon bounding down from his chair and following her with his tail waving.

Morgan waited until she was gone before looking down at his dæmon. “Naemaria…”

“I know,” she said, going to lay down with a sad sigh. “I’ll wait.”

The door was cool under his fingers. “No. Come on.” It was reckless and probably not entirely like him, but all he could think of was Ally and Flakamor—Ally’s arms around Naemaria and that burning sense of _person_ that it had brought. And now, with who this boy could be hovering over him, he needed to know that there was still someone in there to give back to the brave little girl they’d pulled from the sewers.

So he walked into that room with his dæmon at his side, and the boy looked up at him. “Hi,” Morgan said, crouching by the chair. Blue eyes locked onto the dæmon, and widened with hunger. “This is Naemaria. She’s come to talk to you. Do you mind if I stay, or do you want to be alone with her?”

“Stay,” said the boy after a long beat of silence, his voice raspy. “Can I… please?”

He didn’t have to nod. Naemaria leaned her head on the boy’s blanket covered knees and he reached down a trembling hand to stroke her ears. Morgan felt nothing. Just… pressure and a small hint of liking from Naemaria at the gentle touch. “She’s soft,” he said finally. “Hi, Naemaria.”

“Do you want to tell me about your dæmon?” Naemaria asked, after a questioning glance at the silent Morgan. “About your Aisling?”

A slow shake of his head and the boy closed his eyes. Morgan shivered at how still and cold he looked with his eyes shut. _Open them, kiddo,_ he thought, but didn’t say. This was Naemaria’s lead. He had to trust her… just like Reid did Aureilo. “How about your sister? Do you want to talk about Ally?”

Those eyes snapped open and turned from Naemaria to Morgan, wide and frightened. “I…” A shuddering breath. “How? You don’t… you can’t. Ally’s not here. She’s not here. She’s _not here_!”

_Damn._

“No, no, love, she’s not here,” Naemaria soothed, putting one white paw onto the boy’s lap and bumping her boxy muzzle against his chest. “She’s safe. We met her—she’s a brave, brave little girl, isn’t she? You must be so proud.” Hands on his dæmon again and this time… _something_. Something fierce. Something protective. A guttering flame of personality that Morgan knew, knew so intimately…

It felt like himself.

There was still a person in this broken little husk. Still something worth saving.

“I can’t _think_ ,” the boy—Jack? Oh man, Hotch was not going to like that—whimpered, squeezing his eyes shut again. “I can’t. I try and it hurts and there’s nothing but Aisling and where she should be. I’m nothing, just nothing, and they took Ally too. She’s nothing now too.”

Morgan tugged the photo from his pocket and held it out. The boy’s eyes cracked open, damp at the corners and wavering, and he stared at it nervously. Finally, finally, he reached out and took it, unfolding it as carefully as though it was made of the most delicate glass and would shatter with an unguarded touch. “That’s your family,” Morgan said, his voice deep and overloud in this quiet room. “You and your parents and Ally and…”

“Aisling…” A slim finger traced the paper. Morgan could hear it trembling against the surface. “My Aisling.” It was what he needed. They needed to call social services, get them here with Ally… at least seeing his sister might give Jack the final push he needed to survive. Something to live for, even without his dæmon.

“We have to go, Jack,” said Naemaria, and the boy twitched at the sound of his name. “We have to go find the man who did this. But you can keep that photo—and we’ll bring Ally to see you, okay? But you have to be brave, the bravest of all, and you have to stay here and wait.”

“Stay and wait,” Jack repeated numbly. “I can. Wait. Everything is waiting now.”

Morgan left him there, in that room alone with his crumpled photos and his memories and no certainty of a future, and it broke him just a little. Broke them both. Maybe that was why they were brusque on the phone to Hotch when he gave them the address and ignored the call from Garcia when their cell hummed with her number on the display, and maybe that was why they didn’t immediately recognise the figure lurking by their car as they slipped out the hospital and made their way through the parking lot.

“Oh, fuck no,” Morgan said as soon as he realized, and Reid’s mouth thinned into a sharp line. Leaning on the car, the thin plastic bracelet still around his wrist, he looked furiously determined, and Morgan had a horrible suspicion already of what he was going to ask. “Get your skinny ass back in that hospital before I throw it back in there.”

“You need me,” Aureilo said, popping his head up from the cocoon of Reid’s arms and glaring at them. “You need us. He’s not staying without me, and I know the layout of the building. I know where the kids are. You might have your unsub—but you still need to get those kids out as fast as possible, and to do that you need me.”

“They can’t do anything for us here but pain relief and observation,” Reid added quietly. “Dæmon injuries heal on their own. Surgical intervention is too risky, especially for renal trauma. Even in a human, observation would be the recommended course of treatment unless the trauma is severe enough to offset the substantial risk.”

“Yeah, you’ll heal alright,” Morgan retorted. “With rest and recuperation, not with running about on the goddamn field! Hotch will have my job if I let you get in that car, Reid. Is your ego worth my job? Is your ego worth your _health_?”

“Is your concern for my health worth JJ?” Reid snapped back, and Morgan swallowed. “I know I disconcert you, Morgan. I know you don’t like Aureilo, and by extension, me, but please. This one time. You need me—you need mine and Aureilo’s skills.”

Morgan stared. Reid looked so… young. Young and hurt and Morgan was the cause of one of those things. “I like you,” he said finally, shocked that he even had to say it. “Reid, man, you’re my friend. One of my closest. How could you think…”

“We unsettle you,” Aureilo snapped, ears folding back and bending awkwardly over Reid’s arm. “We’re weird.”

“Abnormal,” Reid added, and they were oddly in sync for once. “Off-putting and… difficult to be around. We’re okay with this. Mostly. But we need you, just this once, to trust us. Please? We promise if you do this, if you take us, we’ll be easier in the future. We’ll be less…”

Aureilo again. “Us. We’ll be less us. Plus, if you don’t take us, we’ll just follow by ourselves. You know we will.”

Derek Morgan had been many things in his life, but until this moment, he’d never felt like the kind of person who’d cause someone to apologise for being themselves.

It was horrifying.

“Reid,” he said, the words heavy and choking and _fuck_ that little shit was in his head and probably did it on purpose, and he already knew he was caving. How could he not? “Don’t. Don’t fucking do that. Just… get in the car. Get in and don’t ever, _ever_ , say anything like that again, okay? Not to me, or to anyone.”

Reid eyed him carefully and Morgan’s gut cramped. Maybe he’d said it to guilt Morgan into bringing him along… but Morgan had a nasty feeling that didn’t make any of it any less true. “We’ll stay in the car,” Reid offered.

“No you won’t,” Morgan snapped, opening the door for him and wondering whether he should alert Hotch to the fact that they had a plus one coming along. Well, a plus two. “You stay behind me the whole time and don’t you dare even sneeze without my say so.” He shut the door before Reid could squeak out a reply, and made his way to the driver’s seat. At some point, when this was all over, they needed to talk, him and Reid.

It was a talk that had been a long time coming.

 

* * *

 

The house was the noisy kind of silent. Every footstep, whether muffled by the well-worn rugs or echoed by the hardwood floors, resonated with their presence. Hal’s claws clicked on the floor, at least until Hotch glanced at her and she slunk outside to circle the house. Sergio padded like a ghost after Emily, his whiskers quivering and mouth open, tasting the air. Eris stood motionless on Rossi’s shoulder, gripping his vest easily, and he was breaking all the rules by having the owl inside where a stray bullet could end both their lives, but none of them scolded him. They didn’t need the owl’s ears or Sergio’s nose to tell them that this house was empty and had been for a long time.

Emily prowled through the resonant space and tried to keep her mind away from Morgan and Reid clearing the outside together, and the thunderous fury on Hotch’s face when he’d seen his youngest agent stepping out of the car. That was an issue they’d tackle later, once tempers cooled. Dusty furniture filled every room, the ceilings high and vaulted. Emily felt dwarfed by the desolation of it all.

“No one has been here in years except animals,” Sergio said finally, as they cleared the rooms meticulously anyway. “She’s not here, Emily. JJ isn’t here.”

“He never said she was,” she muttered in reply, calling _clear_ a moment later and hearing Hotch echo it back at her from the other end of the hall. Pushing open another door, she cleared the room, and then looked twice at it. “Oh shit.”

Sergio walked in, green-gold eyes wide and black fur stark against the rug that had once been baby-blue before the years had faded it to the colour of a winter sky. “A child’s room,” he said, sniffing delicately at the wooden bed leg. “Anton’s? Before he died?”

Emily hadn’t been so sure the youngest Harper _was_ dead… but this room was untouched. Everything in its place, as though the occupant had simply stepped out seventeen years ago and never stepped back. A stuffed cow on the bed, head tilted crookedly. Photos on the walls of a young boy with brown hair and a wide-gapped grin holding a chubby lion cub up by its armpits. The same boy, beaming, with a blank-faced teenager standing by his side with an arm over his shoulder. Books, colourful and forgotten. A drawer that sat oddly in its tracks, pushed open by the arm of an orange t-shirt poking out. Emily almost poked it back in, closing the drawer. She almost did.

This room was a memorial.

“How old would he have been?” Sergio asked, vanishing under the bed and reappearing with dust on his whiskers and a cobweb on his ear. “Five?”

“Four,” Emily replied. “Harper said they buried him on the grounds. We should get a cadaver search going. Morgan and Hotch could—”

“Tsk.” Sergio cut her off with a roll of his eyes. “Conflict of interest. You know that. Investigating dæmons can’t conduct the sense searches—confirmation bias could damage the integrity of their findings. Rookie mistake, Prentiss. Get your head out of your ass.”

“Shut it, Fish-breath,” Emily muttered, turning on her heel. She’d get Hotch to call in the team and check out the room. “I don’t think Anton died from a fall.”

“No,” Sergio agreed, following after with his tail lashing. “I think we know who Harper’s first victim was.”

 

* * *

 

Pressing back against the wall of that room, JJ sidled across with one wary eye on the frantically circling unsub. He was panicking, shattering, whatever tenuous hold he had on himself crumbling under this new assault. JJ suspected her arrival had been the first crack in his sanity—Aureilo’s defection with the Intercised dæmons would very likely be the last. If only he wasn’t still holding the gun.

Her fingers trailed against the cold stone as she moved, the surface rough and uncomfortably solid to the touch. Every breath she took was laced with the chemically tang of his nearby workstation and the faintest hint of smoke. Her hip bumped a metal door, her fingers coming to a stop on the slick edge. She paused, still watching him.

“No, no, no, it’s not right,” he mumbled, shaking his head in a painfully familiar motion. The hare sat motionless, unaffected. “I have to cleanse him. I have to finish this. I can’t not… I can’t… can’t!”

“It’s okay,” JJ soothed, and then thought of the horrific room upstairs and swallowed hard. “It’s okay. This was meant to be. He’s done what he was meant to—he’s taken the beasts away. Don’t you want them away?”

The man whirled on her, eyes wild and damp at the corners. “No!” he almost sobbed. “You don’t understand. _I_ cleanse them! I do it, not him, not that _creature!_ I do, like this!” He strode to the workstation, dropping the gun onto the desk, hands flying over the strewn tools and empty firework cases, scattering them. JJ stared at the casings. Those were unusual. Unusual was good. Unusual meant Garcia would be hot on their trail. Unusual was comforting.

“See,” the man said, and turned, and smiled. He held out a firework, half complete with the cap on the end askew. “Look. They ascend.”

Preparing a smile to humour him, she looked at the firework right as he opened the cap and tipped the end. A fountain of gold cascaded from the end, pooling on the stone floor and eddying in the soft breeze from the broken window. Glass glittered among the gold.

The gold.

JJ opened her mouth but no sound escaped. Kailo shuddered against her, a soft whimper tearing from the small creature. She stared at the Dust as it flurried into the air around her shoes, coating her calves with glimmering remains.

_They made me watch. They cut us in half and it hurt, but it didn’t hurt me when they burned him._

Bile burned her throat and she gagged, reeling back. She had to get out. She _had_ to get out, out, out _now!_

_Nothing but golden ashes when they burned him._

She took the firework with a practised, false calm and nodded slowly, feeling something inside her giving way at the gritty feel of a child’s soul coating her fingers. She murmured, the words sticking in her throat and cracking her voice down the middle, “I’m sorry.” Sorry to the child whose murdered soul filled this husk. Sorry to the dæmon who had died so awfully. Sorry to every child she hadn’t saved.

She flung it into his face. He reeled back. Gold glinted in his hair, his eyes, his mouth. He screamed. Rubbed his eyes and left them streaming. Blind.

She ran. She ran and slipped on the gold and the glass, palm thudding against the stone but she kept going. Up the stairs. Through the door. Shoved it shut, slammed the lock home. Her gut lurched with the sound of the lock thumping shut. She buckled and vomited, allowing herself that weakness, trying to wipe her mouth and push her hair out the way at the same time, and leaving her hand covered in red and gold, blood and Dust, and glass and everything that was awful and wrong in this world.

Kailo slipped out and danced around her head, a single spot of colour in the dim corridor. Behind her, she heard the man shrieking, the sound muted by the door. “We have to get the children,” he whispered, and flickered away to the edge of their bond, five feet away if that, desperate. “Jen, please. The window. He can get out. We have to get the children.”

She followed her dæmon, running again. None of the corridors looked familiar to her. Her head ached, the brickwork dancing in her wavering vision. It was impossible to think.

“Here,” Kailo said, and darted down a corridor to a small row of rooms. “This is where he was keeping us.”

“But not the children,” JJ answered, turning to stare back behind her with the anxious, creeping terror of him looming out of the shadows. Every nerve was jangling, panicking, and she knew at any second he could be there with his gun and his knife and his fireworks and Kailo could become nothing but gold on the wind. “They weren’t down here.”

But she was wrong, because there were rooms other than hers. Kailo landed on the handle of one. She tugged it open and found a room with a child within who stared at her emptily. Half a child. She thought of the firework again and gagged, tasting copper and bile.

“Who are you?” asked the girl without any real interest, and JJ stepped in and reached down to scoop her up into her arms without a single complaint.

“I’m here to help,” she murmured into the child’s sweat-sticky hair, and the child just hummed disinterestedly and stared over her shoulder. She was an unresisting weight and it was appallingly like carrying an oversized, breathing ragdoll. “Do you know where the others are?”

“Off to be burned,” whispered the girl, and Kailo called out from the corridor, “Another, Jennifer. Here!”

Three more rooms. Three more empty children. She carried one and tried to guide the others, but they’d take two uncertain steps and then stop, lost. One lay down and wouldn’t get up.

She couldn’t do it alone.

On her knees with no memory of falling, she was desperately trying to coax the little boy up when Kailo twirled down to them. All eyes fell on him; all four eyes when there should have been eight. JJ held her breath.

“Come on,” Kailo called, and landed on a child’s hand. The child cupped him, as though he was infinitely precious, and tears welled in wide brown eyes. JJ felt nothing. There was no sensation of intent or personality from the child holding her dæmon. There was nothing but pressure and Kailo’s sadness.

“We have to go now and find your dæmons,” Kailo continued, and flickered his wings invitingly. Two of the children nodded, slowly shuffling in the direction JJ goaded them. The fourth lay on the floor, still, and closed his eyes. The third was limp in her arms, and she couldn’t carry two.

And there was still that room. That room somewhere in this maze with the children they could save. So many lives depending on her, and only her to save them.

Where was her team?

_Please, Aaron,_ she prayed desperately, closing her eyes for a single second. _I need you. Please hurry._

* * *

It took ten seconds for Reid to know something was wrong as soon as the rest of the team vanished into the house. Ignoring the ache in his back and gut, he paced and peered about, holding Aureilo close.

“This isn’t it,” Aureilo said, turning awkwardly in his arms and ignoring the hot-spark of pain it brought them both. “This isn’t the house. It… smells familiar. But it’s not the house.”

Morgan was watching them both carefully. “You sure?” he asked finally, and Reid couldn’t look at him without seeing shades of the pain they’d brought him drawn across his face. There was going to be hell to pay for that later.

“Positive,” Aureilo answered confidently. “Spence, put me down.”

Reid did, reluctantly. He wasn’t the cuddling type. Neither of them were. But after the last twelve hellish hours… it was oddly difficult to let him go. And when he did, the hare merely hopped a few hesitant, halting steps forward, before looking back anxiously. Neither wanted to be apart, not just yet.

“Maybe…” Aureilo mused. “This way. I think. It was a… outbuilding of some kind. Small rooms and long corridors. Like a church building that had been converted. It was uphill—a river nearby. I could hear it when I was getting the dæmons into the van.”

The dæmons. The dozen Intercised dæmons now at the hospital, fading away. Another reason to move quickly.

“There’s a ridge over there,” Reid murmured, eyeing the uphill slope of the trees. “Maybe… the grounds here aren’t so big, are they?” He hadn’t looked up the schematics of the area. He hadn’t had the chance, not with the madness of the last few hours. “We should head up there—radio the others to join us once they finish with the house.” It was a mile, approximately. They had to move. JJ was up there—Reid could feel Aureilo’s certainty growing as he stood on his hind legs with his ears swivelling towards the ridge.

“Reid…” Morgan trailed off and Reid bit back the frustration that swelled. He was armed. He was—mostly—in one piece. And they needed to _move_. They didn’t have time to discuss semantics—if they did find the building, Aureilo needed to be there. Reid couldn’t let him go alone.

“We have to go, Morgan!” Aureilo yelped, bouncing in place with pent up energy and flinching as it caused another uneasy well of nauseous pain. “The others are busy—we’re out here because they’ve sidelined us and you know it. They’ll be right behind us, and JJ needs us now!”

Morgan’s throat bobbed noticeably as he swallowed, narrowing his eyes and glancing at the house and finally, slowly back at the ridge. Then he nodded. “We go together,” he said, and looked at Aureilo. Reid froze. He spoke _to_ Aureilo. “I trust you. Both of you. Come on.”

They started up the ridge together, with Aureilo leading.

_We’re coming, JJ._


	9. Oranges and lemons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
> 
> Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
> 
> (Chip chop, chip chop, the last man's dead.)

When JJ had begun at the Bureau, Gideon had pulled her aside. That was pre-Boston and he’d still been at the top of his game, still cocky, still supremely self-controlled. She’d envied his abilities. He’d told her that every agent would one day face The Case. The Case that would define their career. The one that would haunt them once they retired, would linger in their minds when they showered or ate or played with their children. The one that, as in Gideon’s case, would eventually bring about their destruction.

JJ was beginning to get to the feeling that this was hers. That feeling was solidified when, for the second time in as many hours, she turned her back on a child who needed her. She left the motionless child laying there in the corridor and she saved the three she could. She took them outside, every moment she spent crossing the empty grounds to the shadowed tree-line ahead a moment she expected a bullet to slam into her spine. The kids followed soundlessly. They went where she told them to. Pliable. Obedient. She waited until they disappeared underneath the shelter of the thick shrubbery, and then turned around and faced the building.

It looked so… normal. An old stone building, possibly once a church. Squat and square and perched in the centre of the muddy clearing, becoming shapeless and grey in the ever-deepening darkness. A scene from any city or town.

A scene from any nightmare.

She took a breath, ran a finger over the trembling form of Kailo on her shoulder, and walked determinedly back towards that building and what waited within. Pushing aside the fear, the pain, the horror, she kept on. She still had a job to do. The lights worked inside but she moved through the dark instead, levelling her breathing out so that a panicked rasp wouldn’t give her away to any eyes or ears lurking around each corner. She moved slowly. Cleared every room she passed, every turn. She found nothing.

She found nothing, until she found the corridor she’d left the child in. The child, still there, just as silent. When she crouched by him and pressed her hand to his throat, it was still and always would be.

“Oh,” said Kailo, his wings closing and staying shut. JJ said nothing.

She picked up the child, hugged him close, and kept on. If there were tears on his face, they weren’t his and she wasn’t ashamed of them.

“Jen,” Kailo said finally, and she looked up to find the door into the airless cell where the children huddled. “Are you okay?”

She didn’t answer. She shifted him in her arms, his body still warm—what was his name? Would they ever know? Who would know to grieve him besides her? —and tugged the bolt on the door open. The smell was expected this time, but it still burned her eyes and her mouth.

“Are you here to help us?” Kayla Chant asked suspiciously, blinking in the dim light from the corridor. The others waited, just as suspicious. Some held hands. Others huddled into themselves. JJ didn’t answer. She’d left her voice somewhere behind with her hope and a child’s life. She just nodded, swallowed back the pain and the hurt, and stepped aside.

“Yes,” Kailo whispered, his voice carrying in the hollowness of the space around them. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

They followed her silently out of that nightmare, and none of them looked back.

 

* * *

 

He followed Reid and the hare along a thin winding track, and tried not to hyper-focus on the catch on the end of Reid’s exhales or the way Aureilo would pause every few hops to steady himself. Bringing them was a mistake. It was a goddamn mistake, and Hotch would have his gun for it. But he didn’t regret it because there was a steely determination on Reid’s face that was mirrored perfectly by his hare, and Morgan knew they were right. They needed to be here for this. They needed Aureilo’s memories of the building, and they needed Reid with him. Two halves of the one soul, and Morgan had no idea how he could ever go about repairing the damage he’d caused to either half.

Their flashlights danced through the forest. Morgan took the chance to radio Hotch, seeing Reid’s shoulders stiffening at the sound of their boss’s stilted anger crackling through the handset at them.

_“Stand down and wait for us,”_ Hotch said, right as the path curved violently up a ridge and out of sight in the darkening light. _“We’re coming now. Just giving coordinates to the sense teams Sheriff Robin is bringing in.”_

“Hotch, we’re right under it, man,” Morgan said, despite not knowing that, not really. When he craned his neck back, the ridge wasn’t so huge. Maybe an easy eighteen feet—JJ could be just up this path, and Reid, Naemaria and Aureilo were all antsy as heck at the foot of the path waiting to move. “You’re five minutes behind us—five minutes is a damn long time in the lion’s mouth. And JJ’s been in it for so much longer.”

Silence. Morgan took the opportunity to flick his flashlight over Reid as the man turned away slightly to examine the edges of the path, careful not to blind him. He looked… okay. Not at the peak of his health, no, but nowhere near as wavering as he’d been back when they were bringing in Harper. He could do this.

_“Reid’s status?”_

“He’s peachy, Aureilo’s obnoxious. We got this. We’ll see you up there, yeah?”

The radio crackled and squalled and Morgan couldn’t tell if Hotch had just sighed into the mic or if the reception was just balls in this section of the woods. Finally: _“We’re right behind you. Do not engage without us.”_

“Understood.” The radio hummed off and he hung it off his belt, striding over to the clustered group by the ridge’s path. “Right, we’re clear to move. Come on. The others are coming, we’re on point.”

“Right,” Reid said, looking up the path again before padding slowly and uncertainly up the first leg of it. Morgan followed, deliberately keeping behind him with one eye on his gait. If he faltered, Morgan would know. Naemaria did the same to the hare, her nose low to the ground.

“This path is well travelled,” Reid said suddenly, about halfway up as the path thinned and pressed them against the chalky rock. “No weeds, well packed. Someone uses it a lot, despite there being far easier paths around this area—there’s a road to the north that gets us to the same place without the precipitous drop.”

Morgan chuckled, feeling a spike of concern from Naemaria. He dropped his gaze to his dæmon, following her eye-line to the hare, before answering as calmly as though he hadn’t noticed the growing list to the hare’s walk. “You scared of heights now, Carrots?”

Reid turned and looked back at him, his flashlight beam flickering over the descent and vanishing into the gloom. “In falls where no Severing occurred between human and dæmon, the median lethal rate of fall height is about forty-eight feet. Most of us would survive a tumble down this ridge with minimal injury, so long as our dæmons went with us. Of course, the average distance capable between human and dæmon is about eight feet, generally maxing out at about twelve feet after which Severing and death occur so basically…”

“So basically, shut up, Reid,” Aureilo groaned, pressing back against the wall. “You’re making me nauseous.”

Naemaria inched closer to his leg. “Oh,” she said, peering at the edge. “We should… move faster. I’m suddenly uncomfortable with this ledge.”

Morgan hid a smile that wasn’t really appropriate and followed Reid up the final steep twist of the path, the ridge cresting overhead. “Careful sticking your head up there,” he called, and saw Reid nod, slowing slightly. Morgan waited, one hand on the butt of his weapon, until his co-worker and the hare vanished over the crest, before following them and finding themselves on a path weaving through sparse, twisted trees. Aureilo stopped, sitting upright and twisting his ears around, focusing intently. Reid watched him, his expression relaxed but eyes focused. Morgan watched the two synchronise, just like he did with Naemaria or Rossi did with Eris, and wondered how he’d missed it before.

He had a small feeling it wasn’t a complete failure on his behalf. There was something so painfully familiar about this scene, the man and the hare. It was like catching a snippet of a long-forgotten radio jingle, and trying to place where he’d heard it before. It was a scene from pre-Hankel, and he was so fucking grateful to see it again.

He swallowed around the lump in his throat and ignored Naemaria’s slowly waving tail. They still had a job to do. “Hear anything?”

“River to the south,” Aureilo said, turning his head carefully. “If we follow this path, it should bring us out on the structure. I… I don’t think we’re alone in these woods. I hear voices.”

“A hare’s hearing over long distance is about the same as a human’s,” Reid said suddenly. “For most low pitches. Voices? Children?”

They exchanged a glance. Morgan nodded. “Move on, quickly,” he said, and drew his weapon, holding his flashlight parallel and moving swiftly onto the path. “Behind me, the both of you.” The _click-shhhhsh_ of Reid drawing his own weapon from its holster was comforting, as was the steady beat of footsteps behind him. The path broke. The building stood ahead, squat and ugly in the broken moonlight. Morgan could see a yawning darkness on one side, double doors. Definitely an old church of some kind. Reid could probably tell him more, but Naemaria chose that moment to scent them.

“Derek,” she whispered, and lowered herself to the ground. He felt Reid stall behind him, Aureilo’s paws skidding noisily on the path as the hare slipped, uncharacteristically clumsy. “To the right.”

Pale shapes bobbed in the gloom. Morgan carefully aimed the light at their feet, both to avoid blinding the kids and to check for dæmons he didn’t expect to see.

“I should hang back,” Aureilo said suddenly, doing so in a sudden flurry of hops that had both Reid and Morgan twitching nervously. “The unsub’s dæmon is a hare. They might panic if they see me.”

Reid’s sharp inhale matched Morgan’s. “No it’s not,” Morgan said overtop of Reid’s startled, “Wait, what?” He continued, seeing Reid pause to allow him to do so. “It’s a dhole—you said it was a dhole or something, yeah? Some dog thing?”

“Fuck,” Reid said, and that was bizarre as shit, hearing the curse word slip from his mouth. “Two unsubs, Morgan. We never considered two unsubs, not beyond Amber being coerced into helping take the children.”

Morgan looked at the horror written across Reid’s face, visible even in the dark, and then back at the huddled kids under the questionable shelter of the bushes. Intercised. He could see it in the lethargic way they turned their heads towards the gleam of his flashlight. They wouldn’t move without coaxing.

Two unsubs.

“JJ,” he said, and he didn’t need to say more because Reid’s face hardened. “Reid—stay here. Please. Just stay with the kids, wait for the team. I have to go to JJ.” Reid nodded, and Morgan turned his back on him and ran towards the building, leaving the man alone.

Not too late. They couldn’t be too late. JJ would be fine.

She had to be.

 

* * *

 

Reid watched Morgan vanish into the cavernous doorway and suppressed a shudder. He felt alone. Aureilo was there, lingering in the undergrowth on the side of the path where the children couldn’t see him, but Reid couldn’t see him either. Normally, this wouldn’t bother him. Today? He inched closer to the undergrowth, just slightly, and radioed the rest of the team alerting them to this new development.

The children were there, but they were grotesquely silent. Reid swallowed hard, thought of talking to them, and found that he couldn’t. He couldn’t. It was too much like facing a nightmare. So he waited, in the silence, and counted anxiously the moments between now and his team arriving.

A branch snapped. The children didn’t react. Aureilo did. He appeared like a ghost at Reid’s side, eyes wide and nose quivering. “Spence,” he murmured, but Reid had already seen them. The man slipping into the shadows of the trees just ahead of them, his dæmon an uneven pale blur at his feet. Reid felt for his gun, then looked at the kids.

“He could be armed,” Aureilo warned. “He was when he had me. If he continues directly from where he is through the trees…”

He’d come out on top of their team. Reid doubted any of them would be taken by surprise, not with Hal and Eris with them, but could he risk the man veering away and disappearing into the thicker forest?

After what he’d done to Aureilo?

After what he’d done to these children?

After what he could have done to JJ?

“Stay with the children,” he whispered to Aureilo, and jogged quietly after the man and his dæmon with his flashlight off. Placing his feet carefully took all his concentration, the way barely lit by the shifting moon, and if it wasn’t for the fact that his quarry was making no attempt to be quiet, he never would have caught him. Aureilo made no noise as he bounced up next to him, ears flat against his spine, but Reid knew immediately that he was there anyway.

“There’s no way his dæmon hasn’t heard us,” Aureilo mumbled, avoiding a slice of bark as Reid’s foot sent stones rattling down a slope. “Why hasn’t he confronted us?”

Reid shrugged, despite knowing the movement would be invisible to the hare, and hunched his shoulders. Ahead, the shadows grew lighter. The edge of the trees. He calculated. The ridge. They were coming out on the ridge. Several hundred yards up from where the path would be leading his team. Damn. Hotch was going to be so pissed with him. Morgan too.

Emily was going to be _terrifying._

When they stepped cautiously out of the trees, they found their unsub waiting. His arms hung by his side, his gun held loosely in one hand and his dæmon behind him on the edge of the drop. Reid steadied his breath and examined the man carefully in the dim light that was available to him. The other hare paced. There was something… lost about its movements. While the man reacted to Reid’s presence, exhaling sharply and raising the gun, the hare didn’t even look. It just paced. There was something disproportioned about it, like it had settled as a form it wasn’t sure as, a half remembered image of a hare instead of the animal itself. If Reid was to place her next to Aureilo, the difference would be vivid and saddening.

And Reid knew.

“You’re Intercised,” he said, feeling his own grief at that fact mingling with Aureilo’s. “We didn’t realize.”

“I didn’t realize,” Aureilo added softly, hopping forward carefully in an arc around the man to place himself closer to the broken hare. “I should have. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

The man’s eyes twitched, his head shaking back and forth jerkily, as though denying it. “No,” he said, his voice pitched low. “Not… that. We’re how we should be. How everyone should be. How is this beast here? I… I ascended him, didn’t I? He is the woman’s? Why is he with you?”

“It’s okay,” Reid soothed, taking another step forward and, just to complete Hotch’s fury with him, lowering his gun. “It’s okay. I can help you. We can help you. This is Aureilo. He’s my dæmon. He’s just like yours—see. He’s a hare. What’s your dæmon’s name?”

Silence. The gun barrel was the only steady part of this unsub, unwavering at Reid’s chest. He was wearing a vest. It wouldn’t kill him. He probably shouldn’t get much closer though, or even the vest wouldn’t help.

He stepped forward again.

“She doesn’t have one,” the man said, biting at his lip so hard that Reid saw blood. He was close enough now that he could see the scratch marks up his arms, the signs of worrying on his fingernails and lips. All signs he knew. Heart sinking, for a moment he thought of his mom. “She’s never had one. Not ever.”

“That’s not true,” Aureilo cut in, and the man looked down at him. For the first time, the gun shifted, ever so slightly. A lung shot instead of his sternum if it went off now. “She’s always had a name. She’s a part of you, and you have a name.”

“Jeremy says—”

Aureilo stood on his hind legs and shook his fur indignantly. “Jeremy’s wrong!” he retorted. “It suited him for you to forget what she is. What she means to you—because if you remembered that, you’d never do what he asked to those children.”

“I was helping them!” The gun steadied again, his finger inching towards the trigger, and Reid felt his own grip becoming slick. This could go wrong. It could go wrong so fast. “I helped those children, like I was helped! My mom…”

“Hurt you.” Reid kept his voice soft. He really, really hoped he was right here. He was pretty sure he was.

“She hurt you, Anton. And you’ve been hurting others. Come with us. We can show you. We can help you remember what your dæmon is to you.”

The hare jolted, suddenly turning her head around and staring at Aureilo with a new kind of focus to her gaze. “Kipling,” she said, her voice a whispering breeze almost lost in the night. “My name was Kipling. I’m nothing now. All I have is this nothingness.”

Aureilo was close enough to touch noses with her now, and he did so. Tentatively. “You’re something,” he said. “Even without him, Kipling, you’re still something. You don’t only have to be half of a whole.”

Anton lowered his gun and Reid breathed again.

 

* * *

 

Emily winced as Hotch’s radio hummed about halfway up the ridge with the last thing any of them had wanted.

_“There’s two unsubs—Amber isn’t the other one,”_ Reid informed them bluntly, and they all sped up. Two unsubs meant that this whole time they’d been fuck-assing around trying to get information out of Jeremy Harper, anything could have been happening to their teammate. They’d been lulled into a false sense of security—that they had the man, he hadn’t mentioned Intercising or otherwise harming her, surely she was just hours away from being found by them. That surely Amber wouldn’t act to hurt JJ on her own. And the whole time, JJ hadn’t been safe at all. Not even in the slightest. Hal hesitated as they moved into the woods. Rossi’s hand stilled on Eris, moments away from her launching from his arm to become their eyes in the air, all looking at the wolf.

“Reid,” Hal said, turning in place and staring to a point parallel to the ridge. “His scent is moving away. I thought he said he was waiting with the children they found.”

“We can—” Rossi began, but Hotch shook his head firmly.

“Keep going—I want you two backing Morgan up. Find JJ.” He strode in the direction Hal had indicated, his face grim and imposing in the wavering lights from their flashlights. “If Reid is moving, he has a good reason. Hal can track him—we’ll meet back at the building. Prentiss, get a line to Robin and get medics on their way to pick up any kids we find.”

They already had two buses drawing up at the lower house, along with the Sheriff’s teams and more on the way. Hotch must be distracted if he’d forgotten that. Emily opened her mouth to say so, but the man and his wolf were gone, swallowed by the constantly shifting shadows of the thin trees.

“Come on,” Rossi said quietly, Eris vanishing with a soft flurry of muted wingbeats to become a grey and brown ghost in the air above. “Watch my back.” It was a command, but it had none of the force behind it that Hotch or Morgan would have put into it. It was a simple statement of fact—him reassuring her of his absolute trust in her ability to keep her teammates safe.

“Watch the path, it curves,” Sergio called, bounding easily along with his cat eyes picking up every bump and loose rock on the unsealed surface they followed. “Here—the kids are here.”

The house stood in front of them. There was something immensely settled about the solid stone structure buried in these woods, despite the wide swathe of long-ago cleared grounds between it and the trees. Emily admired it for a moment, before whatever horrors they found within removed any pleasure she could find, before crouching to peer down at the children who crept silently forward to reach hungrily for Sergio. The cat dæmon twitched away nervously, unwilling to let their hands touch him, and Emily swallowed back a bite of discomfort as a finger brushed his side.

“Why would Reid leave them?” she asked Rossi as the man studied the exterior of the building that contained two of their agents. “He didn’t even leave Aureilo behind. What would make him do that?”

“I don’t know,” Rossi replied bluntly. “But I think we’re going to need to do the same. They’re safe enough here—I need you with me, Prentiss. We’re splintered enough.” Emily looked at the small cluster of motionless children, and knew he was right. Not for the first time, she envied Reid his ability to move away from Aureilo. If she could have, she would have left Sergio here just so these children never had to be alone. She’d have done that for them. But she couldn’t.

“We’ll be back,” she promised them. None of them even looked at her. She followed Rossi to the building, her senses alive with the night, and she didn’t look back because she wouldn’t be able to keep going if she did. The door creaked open under Rossi’s hand, already ajar, and Sergio slipped through. Invisible against the stone, she should have felt vulnerable with her heart and soul moving first into danger. She didn’t. His coat hid him, his movements smooth and concealed. Without the cat-size Kevlar vest he’d been issued, he could move unseen in most shadowed situations and she took full advantage of this. Hotch wouldn’t be pleased, but then, the man rarely was. And it wasn’t like he made Aureilo wear his vest either, or kept on Rossi to keep Eris in the air and out of the firing line.

“Morgan, sound off,” Rossi whispered into his radio, the empty hum over the line deafening as they cleared the rooms branching off from the corridor they were in. Each was caked in dust except for the centre of the floor where countless footprints disturbed the dirt. No way to tell which way their team members where. She cleared another room, hearing Rossi doing the same, their breathing quiet and even.

_“Rossi—I’m in the east wing. Naemaria says JJ’s scent is all over this place. When the corridor forks, take the left door. This one is almost completely empty.”_

“Almost?” Rossi questioned as Emily jogged forward, finding the fork Morgan was talking about. Silence. Emily waited, anxious, Sergio turning in tight circles around her legs. They both needed to _move_.

_“Show you after. Moving out. Keep in contact.”_

And he was gone. Rossi muttered a phrase in Italian that he’d probably forgotten she understood and aimed his flashlight down the right corridor before stepping over to the left. “I don’t like this,” he muttered. A flicker past the grimy window indicated Eris sweeping past. So _now_ Rossi chose to keep her out of harm’s way. Useful. Although, her wingspan in here would easily brush both sides of the corridor easily. No room to manoeuvre. She took point. Sergio paced by her heels, nose and ears working along with his eyes.

“Wait,” he said suddenly, softly. “Prentiss…”

She smelled it too: the sticky, rotting aroma of human waste. Rossi’s mouth thinned into a tight line. They took either side of the corridor and inched forwards, Sergio slinking up to a door that stood slightly ajar. In the silence of that waiting moment, Emily heard it: a muffled, gasping kind of sob that a child made when scared beyond belief.

“FBI,” she called, seeing Rossi’s eyes flicker to her. “Come out. We’re here to help.”

The gasp became sharper, edged with a sob, and a familiar voice along with it. _“Emily!”_ called that voice, and Emily almost gasped herself.

“JJ,” her and Rossi said together, and pushed the door open to reveal a room of wide-eyed children and JJ standing firm between them with another child in her arms and her expression somehow both steady and broken. “My god, JJ,” Emily breathed, lowering her gun.

“Don’t,” JJ stammered, taking an unsteady step forward. “He’s still here. He’s armed. I don’t know where he is. Emily, oh god, Emily. I knew you’d come.”

Emily had to lower her gun then because JJ, child and all, was suddenly against her, shivering and cold, and Emily couldn’t have resisted pulling her into a hug even if she’d wanted to, revelling in the comforting thump of her continued heartbeat. Kailo was on JJ’s shoulder, and Emily would never ever admit to anyone just how dizzying the relief of seeing him was, not even aware until that moment just how haunting the possibility of finding JJ without him had been.

“Of course,” she said, and took the opportunity to bring the hand not currently holding JJ close up between them, fumbling for the child’s wrist. She knew seconds before she registered the lack of a pulse that she wouldn’t find one. The skin under her fingertips was unnaturally unyielding to the touch, and JJ’s shoulders shook. “You’re okay, Jayge. You’re okay. We’re here now. Time to go home.”

There was blood on JJ’s hands, on her pants, on the child she held. Blood and… gold. Emily swallowed. Hard.

“No,” JJ whispered, looking down at the body in her arms, and she wouldn’t let Emily take him from her. “I’m not okay, Em. I’m really not.”

 

* * *

 

Emily tugged JJ close, despite the child between them, and Rossi looked away so neither of the women felt any shame for the tears between them. He bent down. “Hello,” he said quietly, and most the children pulled away. “Come on, you lot. Chins up. Bet you’re all raring to get outta this room, yeah?” A slow wave of nods. Rossi stood. Reunion over, they had to move.

“Prentiss,” he called, turning slightly on his heel. “You and JJ, get the kids out. Gather them on the roadway—the medics will need to see them all.” He flicked his eyes to JJ and then back to Emily, his message clear. JJ especially. She didn’t look good, but god, could he blame her? There was a brittle kind of misery around her, a dangerously fragile air that suggested JJ had reached her breaking point hours ago, and just kept going. Woman was a damn superhero.

One day soon, he’d tell her how proud of her he was.

“Get them out and stay with them,” he continued, ushering the children into a rough group and darting a quick look at the boy in JJ’s arms. It didn’t take much of a glance to confirm the kid was beyond saving. They could take him out of this place though. No one left behind. Not a single person, not while he was here to ensure otherwise.

“Where are you going?” Prentiss asked, brow furrowed, and he knew she was calculating Eris’s distance from him and disliking the idea of leaving him alone in these corridors. Too bad. He was a big boy—and he wanted Prentiss and her cat with the kids, where no one could sneak up on them. “We should…”

“Get them out, meet up with Hotch and Reid,” he said, and cleared the corridor before stepping out. “Oi, you lot. Stick with these ladies, got it? No running off.” Dæmons and children nodded. “I’m finding Morgan.”

Prentiss eyed him carefully, then nodded. One of her hands was being commandeered by a young girl with blonde hair and a thumb shoved into her mouth. Oddly, the child examined him just as intently as Prentiss had. Brilliant. By the time he got out of here, Prentiss would probably have the lot trained up and ready to take over from him. The curse of the old to be overshadowed by the young. He thought about saying _stay safe_ or _be careful_ but really, both of them were redundant and just a way to put off the moment the motley little crew of agents, children, and dæmons vanished around the corner and left him alone.

If this was what Reid felt like when Aureilo pissed off to do whatever it was that Aureilo did, he could keep it. Eris was nearby, circling overhead, but it was an uncomfortable distance and exactly why Rossi hated the ‘no avian dæmons on point’ rule some bureaucrat had come up with. Taking a breath, he went the other way, following the ring of corridors around until his radio hummed with a quiet, _“Rossi, sound off.”_

“West corridor. Where are you?”

_“Fifth door to the left. Found a basement nearby. Looks like it’s where he was keeping Aureilo and the dæmons. Empty now.”_

Rossi didn’t answer, deigning instead to count his way through the empty rooms until he found the one containing Morgan and Naemaria. He found the basement, scouted it out, and was fucking glad to leave it behind. Some of the rooms weren’t so empty. Some had chains. Some had cots. Some had scratch marks on the floor and wall, small and desperate. One had a blade, keen-edged and _terrifying_ in a primal way he didn’t really understand. It hung suspended in the air by a complicated rigging, and Rossi eyed the patterns carved into the stone underneath and decided quickly he needed to know nothing about what any of it was used for.

There was gold in the cracks between the pavers, and he closed the door and tasted bile.

“Dave,” Morgan said when Rossi walked in, calling out first so he didn’t end up shot, and he sounding fucking wrecked. It only took a moment to realize why. This room wasn’t empty. It was a nest of ragged bedding in the corner and peeling scraps of paper taped to every wall. Half burnt candles sat extinguished on most flat surfaces, surrounding by pools of hardened wax. A lopsided desk was covered in more books, more papers, the whole room an array of cramped, scratchy handwriting and diagrams that were impossible to take in at one glance.

Morgan stood by the desk with a book open in his hands and his face taut with revulsion. “Instructions,” he said finally, turned to look at Dave. “Everything in here. It’s all about how to Intercise dæmons. Children’s dæmons.” He jabbed his finger at a teetering pile of files. “Adults’ dæmons.” Another pile. “How to kill the human but not the dæmon.” This was a collection of papers on the wall. “Fucking… _bullshit_ on partially severing links. Keeping them close enough that the bond is one way. Just. All of it. So much.”

He was shaking, horror-struck, and Naemaria cowered on the floor under him. Rossi swallowed and eyed the room, thinking. There was a shuttered window that he strode over to, ignoring Morgan’s soft questioning _hmm_ and bringing his flashlight down on the rusted lock to spring the thing open.

Eris landed on the sill, her eyes taking in it all. “The unsub is in the woods,” she said, switching her amber gaze back to him. “That’s who Reid went after. Hotch is with him. JJ and Emily are by the road, with all the children. You are quite alone in there.” As always, she understood him. She’d never steered him wrong before.

“There’s a basement,” Rossi said after running his finger down his owl’s chest in greeting. “Cages. An incinerator. Fireworks filled with…”

“I know.” Morgan’s voice cracked. “There’s shit here on that too. Using… using Dust. He’s mad, Rossi. Completely mad. But fuck… this stuff. All of this stuff. It’s more than exists anywhere else. No one else has this information. This shouldn’t even _exist_.” Rossi looked around the room once more. No one should have this information. It should have died out a long time ago.

“Morgan, out,” he barked, and the man jolted and stared at him. Rossi took the book and tossed it onto the desk. “Now.”

Dark brown eyes met his, narrowed. He didn’t ask why. But he didn’t leave either. “I’m not leaving you here.”

“Good,” Rossi said with the kind of grin that would have had Hotch immediately reaching for a disciplinary notice. “I don’t plan on staying. I’m coming with you, just a second behind. But I want you out that door—and whatever you do, no matter what, Reid doesn’t come within spitting distance of this building, you got it? I don’t care if you have to sit on him. I want him out there, preferably facing the other way. Now shoo.”

Lighter in his pocket. He flicked the lid, the flame guttering to life, and without breaking his gaze, lit one candle. Then another, lining them up carefully on the desk, surrounding by the papers and the musty books and the splintering wood of the furniture. He’d have to remind Reid later about just how much of a firetrap books could be.

Morgan took one look at the lighter and his mouth turned upwards into the kind of smile that would _definitely_ have worried Hotch. Then he walked out, slowly and carefully, and Rossi knew he was quietly biding his time for Rossi to catch up.

“You sure you’ve thought this through, Dave?” Eris asked as Rossi pocketed the lighter and turned to leave. The room danced with the uneven light of the flames. He heard her weight shift from the window to the desk, her talons clicking on the wood.

“Name one person you can think of who you’d trust with this information and I’ll blow them out right now,” Rossi called back, pausing in the doorway.

“Reid.”

At that, he did laugh. Yeah. The kid was probably the only person who’d want to know this kind of thing purely for the knowing of it, never the using. Which was exactly why there had to be no question that Spencer Reid and his eidetic memory had never been near this room. This knowledge died today. “See you on the outside,” he said to his dæmon, and closed the door.

If anyone saw the owl swoop out of the open window minutes before the creeping flames caught the shutters alight, no one ever told him about it. And he never offered the information. He’d never been one for following the rules.

 

* * *

 

Hal lead him easily through the trees, and they found Reid standing by the forest edge— _unarmed_ —facing off with their second unsub. The gun that was lowered lifted again when Hotch stepped out, and he cursed silently. If Reid had already talked him down, they’d just messed that up. Hal prowled cautiously around the edge of the tree-line, eyes watching everything at once as she gauged the situation. Hotch gauged it too.

Gun aimed at Reid’s chest. Reid’s vest. If the unsub’s finger slipped: best case scenario, cracked ribs and behind-armour blunt trauma. Six to twelve weeks out of the field. Worst case? The gun jerked up as the trigger was pulled.

A shower of gold and a state-funded funeral.

“Your dæmon,” the unsub said, turning his head to stare at Hotch. Hotch heard Reid murmur _Hotch_ in a kind of desperate voice that suggested he wanted Hotch to leave. Which wasn’t happening. “What would you be without her?”

Hotch ignored that. “Lower your weapon. On the ground, hands behind your back. Now.”

Clouds scudded across the sky, for a second turning the dim lighting bright as the moon appeared from behind the overcast cover, illuminating the two hares on the cliff edge. Hotch’s heart skipped a beat at how close their paws were to the jagged drop. But Aureilo was never clumsy. He’d be fine.

“Anton, please,” Reid pleaded. “Let this end now. JJ—my friend. She’s my friend. You don’t want to hurt her.”

Anton. Anton Harper. _Fuck,_ Hotch thought, swallowing. Prentiss was right. The youngest Harper hadn’t died after all.

“I didn’t hurt her.” The gun lowered slightly, again, and Hotch tensed ready. He saw Hal move into position to grab the man’s dæmon, jerking her head at the larger of the two hares to get out of the way of her lunge. “She ran from me. I should have shot her, Jeremy would have wanted me to, but she’s an adult. We’re not supposed to talk to them, really. And she’s… perfect.”

“We took her dæmon though,” the female hare said, backing away from Aureilo suddenly, hind paws skittering dangerously. “We took him. We took you. You’re her dæmon and we took you. We did hurt her. Just like those kids. Just like us. There’s no repentance for that.”

“You didn’t take me, I’m right here—” Aureilo tried to calm the hare down, but she was gone, shaking and panicking, white showing around the rims of her eyes. “Kipling!”

“No repentance,” Anton said, and dropped to his knees. The gun hit the ground. “No salvation.”

“Kipling, don’t!” Reid barked, and bolted forward. Hotch moved too, unsure whether he was going for Reid or Anton, Hal bounding towards the two hares.

Aureilo leapt, paws thudding into the other hare in a desperate attempt to stop her from doing exactly what Hotch had feared she was about to and throwing herself over the cliff edge. They rolled. Close. Too close. One went over, he couldn’t tell which.

_He couldn’t tell which._

“Aureilo!” Hal shrieked, or maybe Hotch just imagined the scream, grabbing the remaining hare and dragging it back with her paws skidding on the loose shale. Hotch was right there, one hand on Anton’s shoulder, the other still on his gun, and he saw what was about to happen before it happened. Paws slipped out from under her. Her flank hit the dirt, hind legs over the edge, her own weight dragging her down. Mouth open in a wide panicked shape, the hare pulling free, safe, barely. Hal scrabbled at the dirt, and slipped.

Hotch reached for her with the hand that had been holding Anton, but she vanished with a yelp. As she fell, someone reached into Hotch’s chest and tore out his heart.

He screamed. 


	10. Epilogue

There were downsides to an eidetic memory. There were things he’d never be able to forget, no matter how much he tried. One of those things now was the horror on Hotch’s face as Hal had dropped from sight. It had shifted impossibly quickly to a blank-faced shock, and then pain. Absolute pain.

Reid had seen the exact moment their bond had strained. He’d seen on the other man’s face a mirror image of the wide-eyed emptiness that stared back at him every time he slipped down to archives and rewatched the Hankel videos on the grainy monitor. He’d seen himself.

He’d run from it. As Hotch had crumpled, a puppet with his strings cruelly cut hitting the ground hard and heavy, Reid had run. Past Anton, who’d fallen too despite there being no link to snap between him and the hare that had preceded Hal into obscurity. Past Morgan and Rossi, both with their weapons out and running towards the scream that still rang in Reid’s ears. But Reid couldn’t wait for them to catch up. He had to run, to beat death there.

Along the ridge, down the slope, scrambling and slipping and almost plunging off the edge himself. Aureilo had bolted past, pain and panic mingling together and hardly waiting until they were at a safe height before leaping from the path to the ground with a heavy clatter of paws and scree, launching himself towards the area where Hal would have landed.

He’d found her.

She’d been a silent, crumpled form and her mouth hung open, tongue lolling loosely, her legs and neck held at insecure angles that the lithe wolfdog would never permit when awake. She was always supremely controlled, elegantly held, and now she’d been strewn across the rocky ground and left discarded. He’d never forget that. That, or sitting by her side with his fingers pressed against her pulse behind the crook of her leg. That, or the gold that coated her fur, the ridge, his hands.

Kipling had found her oblivion.

There were other things: the yellow of the brace they’d strapped to Hal’s neck before lifting her with painful care onto a stretcher; the grey of the heavy gloves used to stop their skin from touching hers; the sallow shadows the red and blue lights of the ambulance, the police, the fire trucks, left on familiar faces, turning them unaccustomed and cold.

The glow of the flames on the horizon as the building burned—how? How had that happened? What had happened? Someone had told him, but their voice was muted by the sirens, the radios, the chatter of a crime-scene. All images he’d carry for the rest of his life.

And leading to this moment.

Leading to slipping away from the paramedics and the medical care they offered him just one last time, despite the draining pain and worry that tried to drag him down. The keys were in the SUV. His cell was in his pocket, still switched off from the hospital. He’d stayed by Hal until he couldn’t any longer, and now he had one more duty to her and Hotch. One more thing he needed to do before he could let the adrenaline fade. Before he could step away from this case.

Aureilo was silent, still. Pulling all their aching into himself so Reid could focus on this last thing.  He paced and counted and ignored the way the ache in his lower back had spread to his abdomen and chest, ignoring the shakes that began to work their way up his legs and arms and ignoring the collecting pain behind his eyes. He needed medical care. But not yet. Not… yet…

And then it was done. He checked, rechecked. Smiled, because this was _good_. They needed this.

The job was done, the case almost closed, and for once he knew he could leave the loose ends to another member of his team. He didn’t have anything left to give. He sat back in the car, engine off, and sent a message to Emily telling her where he was. He didn’t have the energy to turn the key or drive or think anymore. All he had left in him was to wait, Aureilo on his lap and head against the steering wheel.

The door opened. Reid blinked, feeling his eyelashes brush against the wheel, unsure of how much time had passed between him texting Emily and now. A hand brushed his cheek, cool and rough at the fingertips.

“That’ll do, Tiger,” Emily murmured, and he tilted his head around to look at her. “You’re all done in. Idiot.”

“Get him into the passenger side,” said a deep voice, and the back door clicked open. Naemaria leapt in, panting, leaning her head on the shoulder of the driver’s seat and _tsking_ at him. Morgan. “I’ll drive. You follow us back.”

The next time Reid looked up, the forest was giving way to houses and telephone poles and dawn was turning the world hazy and clean. Morgan glanced at him, a tired smiled tugging the corner of his mouth upwards. “You with me now?” he asked, tapping the indicator on. Reid stared at the blinking light, feeling oddly disconnected from it all.

“I think?” he replied eventually. “Morgan, I checked. I counted. Hotch and Hal were nineteen and a half feet apart when you were arresting Jeremy Harper. Nineteen and a half. She only fell eighteen feet, plus, the distance her momentum took her. Twenty-one feet max. Their bond could have taken that. They might not have Severed.”

Morgan thought that over. “A sudden distance is more dangerous than a gradual one,” he said finally. “Just don’t… don’t set yourself up to be hurt, Reid. They might have taken more damage than you think.”

Reid shook his head. They were fine. He’d counted. They’d wake up and be fine.

“Reid,” Morgan said abruptly, voice cracking. Nervous. Why? “Spencer.”

Uh oh. Reid tensed and felt Aureilo doing the same in his lap.

“We… I need to say something. To you. About my conduct towards you.”

Oh. “No you don’t,” Reid disagreed, irritation sparking. It wasn’t real irritation. He was overtired, it was his exhaustion talking. He tamped it back before speaking again. “There’s nothing to talk about, Morgan. Despite our personal differences, you’ve never behaved in anything other than a professional manner towards me.”

The car stopped. They were at the hospital. When did that happen? Reid was losing time. He peered at Morgan through his lashes, trying to tell if the man had been talking while Reid had unfocused. By the look of his dark gaze firmly on the dashboard, he hadn’t.

“That’s the thing,” he said finally, running his fingers over the keys. “Our personal differences. I… you apologised to me for being yourself. I made you feel like you needed to apologise for something you should never, ever apologise for—do you understand why that’s not okay?”

Reid was pretty sure he wasn’t awake enough for this conversation.

“It’s fine,” he tried to say, smiling crookedly. “It’s nothing. You’re not the first person I’ve—”

“Exactly!” Morgan barked, and Reid jumped at the sudden shout. Aureilo almost slammed his skull into Reid’s chin as the hare did the same, both of them staring at the other man. “Jesus, man, I don’t want to be like those others! Like the kids who used to pick on you or your dad or… _anyone_. I’m not them. I can’t. I can’t live with myself if I am. You don’t see how cruel they are because you think you _should_ have to apologise for the things that make you _you_ —you think they’re right. And they’re not. I should have been teaching you that, and instead I was just adding to your certainty that there’s something wrong with you, or with Aureilo. And I… don’t… I don’t know how to fix this.”

“There’s _nothing_ wrong with you,” Naemaria added in the stunned silence that followed Morgan’s increasingly agitated speech. Reid threaded his fingers tightly through the soft fur of Aureilo’s chest and tried not to let his face twist into something that looked like confusion or misery in case it worsened Morgan’s aggravation. “Either of you. We know that now. This case, everything about this case… that showed us how wrong we were. How closeminded. You’re not Buford. Aureilo isn’t Carmody. We just needed to remember that.”

At that, Reid looked properly at Morgan.

_Oh._

“Buford used his dæmon, didn’t he?” Reid said quietly, feeling ill. “To… prey on his victims.”

It wasn’t unheard of. They’d faced similar cases before.

“She’d talk to us.” Morgan’s voice was painfully raw. He’d never quite healed. Some things left scars that never really went away. “While he… she’d keep talking to us, telling us it was fine, we were okay, that what he was doing was because they loved us. Sometimes she talked more than he did. Sometimes… sometimes she stayed with me, alone, while he… while he was with Naemaria… eventually, I hated her voice. I hated her. I loved him, because I was a kid and he was my hero, but I hated her. She was the one who haunted me when I closed my eyes. He never said a word throughout any of it, but she never shut up. I should have realized I was letting my issues with her negatively reflect on my relationship with you. Reid, I’m going to do better, okay? I’m going to do right by you this time. But you have to promise me something.”

Reid didn’t overly feel that Morgan needed to do better. The man had done nothing wrong. But he could also sense that this was in some way… cathartic. “Anything.”

“You have to do better too. No more stupid risks. No more pushing us away. And Jesus, man. You and Aureilo? You got each other back. Stop being so scared of being separated again that you forget to be together. Being two halves of one whole doesn’t make either of you any less.”

There was a long moment of waiting silence until Reid realized he was waiting for Aureilo to answer for him, like he usually would. Looking down, he found the hare looking expectantly up at him. “Okay,” Reid said belatedly. Aureilo’s silence was odd. Almost unsettling. But… it was weirdly thrilling to answer for himself for once. “We can do that.”

“Piece of cake,” Aureilo added.

It was a beginning.

 

* * *

 

Anton Harper sat dæmonless in the hospital room, handcuffed to the bed with two uniformed officers standing grim-faced at the door. Any nurses who entered were curt, brisk, and hesitated before touching him. Everyone knew why he was there. Rossi had imposed an instant injunction on chatter about the resident in Room 415 to avoid any of the parents still resident in the hospital with their children from finding out that that man who’d done it was right there, but nurses talked and angry nurses talked a lot. Emily knew it was only a matter of time before the hatred and fury that ran hot through the heart of the town was turned towards that silent, empty husk sitting on the neatly made bed.

While they ran more tests on JJ, Emily waited there. Just in case. Anton was… easy to hate, she suspected. She could feel it, the possible hatred towards who he was and what he’d done, but at the same time she’d seen the gold that was all that remained of the dæmon who’d never left him despite the lack of anything tying them together. She’d seen the marks on his arms and his mouth, the ragged remains of his nails.

Easy to hate, hard to pity. So Emily chose to pity him rather than hate him, because it was their job to do so. If they allowed themselves to hate, they’d be consumed by it before long. It was easier to stand here and be a barrier between him and that hatred rather than standing outside the room where Hotch lay unconscious and possibly destroyed from the inside-out. That was… she couldn’t do it again. Not again. Not with Hotch. She’d never realized how much she relied on Hotch to be steady and immovable until suddenly he wasn’t either of those things, and she’d give anything to have him back again.

_Reid was fine,_ she told herself, and ignored her brain chanting, _not for a long time._

_It wasn’t such a hard fall,_ she tried instead, and her own mind turned against her again and shouted, _yes it was. Further than you could go. Further than Sergio could._

_He’ll be okay,_ was her final attempt. Her mind was silent on that.

_Will he?_

“Prentiss,” Rossi said, stepping up behind her. He looked old. Old and unhappy and scared, and that made her mind quieten and shrink away into a small, frightened ball. It was uncomfortable to see Rossi so… disconcerted. “Any fuss?”

“None,” she replied, and looked away from his sadness. “Hotch?”

“No change. They won’t know more until he wakes up. They think Hal’s leg is broken, possibly dislocated at the hip, but they don’t want to move them to x-ray her until they know if…” He trailed off and she felt Sergio shudder against her neck and dig his claws possessively into her shoulder. She understood his message. _Mine_ , those claws declared, and she was glad for it. Eris made a soft _churr_ deep in her throat, and turned her head to nip at Rossi’s ear. They were all clinging.

“The house?” she asked, because she’d rode with Hotch to the hospital while the fireman were still battling the fire and then left shortly after arriving to find their once-again wayward Reid. “What the hell caused the blaze?”

Rossi turned to her with an expression so woefully innocent she immediately began concocting alibis for him in her mind. “No idea,” he grunted. “Last I heard it was in the process of being gutted. The shell will stand, not likely much else. Oddly, no one was overly keen to save the place. Can’t imagine why.”

Emily studied him, then smiled. “No, I can’t imagine,” she said, and brushed her fingers gently against his elbow. “Some things are better left forgotten.”

 

* * *

 

There were tests, endless tests. Countless, innumerable, no doubt Spence could come up with another dozen synonyms for the amount of poking and prodding they subjected her to, when all she could bear was the thought of her home, her bed, her son’s arms around her. She called Henry as soon as they’d let her. He cried on the phone because she’d lost control of her voice, couldn’t find the words to express how much she loved and needed the continued beat of his heart, and finally Will had taken the phone.

“Jennifer?” he said, his voice confused and scared, and she realized she was crying and that was another thing she couldn’t control. She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t okay, and she wasn’t hiding it.

They made her stay the night. ‘Observation’ they said, for her concussion, but the room they put her in was barely a shout from the nurse’s station and they kept the door ajar. She knew that in the DICU, Hotch and Reid were both in a similar room.

Emily left her side only once. When she returned, she clung to JJ’s hand with a tenacity that would have put Morgan’s to shame. JJ let her, sensing that she wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt by the last twenty hours. Kailo rested between Sergio’s shoulder-blades, a bright yellow splash of colour on the black swirl of the cat’s silky fur. Both dæmons watched their humans, watched the tests and the tears, and neither said anything. After what felt like a forever of helpless sobbing, Emily took the phone from her and moved away.

JJ let her. Will deserved to know what had happened, and she couldn’t do it in a way that wouldn’t terrify him. They’d be having _the_ conversation when she got home, she knew. The one they had every time one of them had a close call. She didn’t know how this one would end. She wasn’t okay.

Maybe it was time to reconsider what it would take to be okay again.

No one was talking about Hotch, so she worried about him. She worried about Emily, who kept checking her silent cell at her waist, and she worried about Rossi, who’d walked in once without saying a word, his face grey and older than she’d ever seen it. Eris drooped on his shoulder, her eyes half-lidded and feathers dull. JJ worried about Spence as well, because she still hadn’t seen him and all the quiet affirmations in the world couldn’t convince her that he was okay when the last time she’d seen his dæmon, the hare was lying in a cage bloodied and screaming.

Morgan hugged her when he found her sitting on the bed she’d been given, dressed in the plaid blue pyjamas they’d issued her. The material was soft and clean, such a far cry from the filthy clothes she’d peeled from her body before scrubbing her skin raw, and she hated it. Hated that she had it, when so many of the children she’d needed to protect were instead naked on cold steel beds waiting for a coroner’s knife. Maybe it was time to not be okay. Maybe this was it.

“We’re here for you,” was all Morgan said, and Naemaria echoed the sentiment, but then visiting hours were over and they left her alone.

She couldn’t be alone.

The nurses were watching her carefully, but she worked with the most observant people in the world and she’d gotten far more past them. It was the work of an instant to sidle out when someone called the nurses away up the hall. It was almost ridiculously easy to pad quietly along the halls until she found the door that swung open under her hand and revealed brightly painted walls made garish by the dim night lighting. And it was the work of a second to find them. She knew these halls now. After the past day, she’d never forget these halls. There were twelve rooms in the DICU, only twelve, and she knew which ones contained children, which contained fading dæmons, and which contained her family.

She slid into the room and shut the door behind her, closing herself in with the softly murmuring machines narrating his body’s refusal to bow down to what had happened and the ever-present knowledge that it was happening again.

She’d seen him like this before, once. After Foyet. She’d seen him still and sad and damaged in a hospital bed as he and Hal healed from everything the world had used to try and destroy them. This was different. Then, despite the knife wounds that had littered Hal’s body, she’d still lain on her own bed. They’d still allowed them that separation, that illusion of their distinctness.

This time, they’d laid her alongside him: a long, black line of barely moving fur and muscle that contrasted wildly with the pastiness of his bare skin against her. Bare, except for a sheet that covered them both, the room kept warm enough that his almost-nudity wouldn’t expose him.

They’d done that with Reid too, once his vitals had stabilized but his connection hadn’t. Sedated him into unconsciousness to stop the screaming and then lain his dæmon across his heart, fur to skin. Anything to keep them close and connected.

It hadn’t worked with him.

The other bed was just as silent but more concealed; Reid a barely discernible bulk of huddled blankets from where he’d buried himself into the linen. JJ held her breath. Reid slept lightly, he always had. Anytime she shared a room with him, he was liable to jolt awake at the barest hint of the sheets rustling under her body, peering up and over his own blankets like a startled owl with a soft, _You okay?_ But he didn’t even twitch, out cold, and the small bed next to him that the nurses had supplied for Aureilo stood empty. 

“Oh, Hal,” Kailo whispered, fluttering over and landing on the grotesque bulk of the cast that immobilised the wolf’s hind leg and hip. She’d landed heavily, rolled on it. The damage was impossible to discern while they still desperately needed to know whether her bond with her human remained intact. They wouldn’t know that until he woke.

The leg of the chair she dragged carefully over to the side of Hotch’s bed caught on the linoleum and squeaked, staying her hand and her breath as she waited for detection. But no one came. Reid didn’t move, his breathing just as even and deep. She’d never known him to sleep so deeply, glancing worriedly over as she eased into the chair and released her breath with a shaken sigh, her head throbbing with the beep of the machine. Half of her wanted to sneak over there too and check, just… _make sure_ … that he was okay, but the other half reminded her of the last pulse she’d tested and failed to find.

“I’m sorry, Aaron,” she said, her voice a whisper, and then she lowered her head onto the soft sheets of his bed. Her forehead brushed his arm, painfully cool to her flushed skin. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

The silence stretched, strained, kept on. Impossibly long. The beeps counted it and she counted them until her mind swam and she missed her family. All her family. She thought of Morgan, or Emily and Rossi, all alone in their hotel rooms. She thought of Garcia, alone in her home. She wanted to look up and over at Reid, but she worried too much and she couldn’t. She thought of Will and ached. She thought of Henry who she’d be going home to soon, and Jack, who didn’t know what had happened and wouldn’t until they knew more.

She thought of all of them and knew she could never leave them. Her eyes burned again, choking on the horror of everything she’d seen, the gold and the firework and the knife, and Anton Harper’s mad-hurt eyes, and Kayla Chant’s trusting ones. She thought of two hares, one gone to Dust and one that still breathed and loved like the other never had.

Who would he have been without his mother’s knife? Or his brother’s cruelty?

A cough sounded out that wasn’t hers, dry and pained. She froze. Reid? Eyes closed, too scared to hope, until a hand touched her cheek, cutting a gentle line through the sticky trace of tears.

“JJ.” Hotch more breathed the words rather than said them, and when she looked up—fully aware she was in a painfully unprofessional position right at this moment—both he and Hal were looking down on her with eyes that were knowing. “How are you?”

The man woke up from almost having his dæmon torn from him, and the first thing he asked was if she was okay.

“Me?” she murmured, well aware that she’d be in a world of trouble if caught. “Hotch, Hal fell off a cliff. How are _you_?”

Hotch blinked, his dark eyes catching the light, and then he looked at his wolf. “Numb,” Hal complained suddenly, trying to twist upright to peer down at her hip and leg. Hotch exhaled with a hastily bitten back moan, his hand jerking towards his own thigh reflectively and his eyes narrowing as he noted his lack of attire under the sheet, yanking it tighter around his hips.

“Ow,” he breathed. “That hurts. I feel that. Hal, I feel that.” He smiled through the pain that still showed. Not Severed.

_Not Severed._

They’d be okay. They would heal from this.

Maybe she could too.

 

* * *

 

When they got to the hospital in the morning, it was to the most fucking welcome sight any of them had had in two days.

Rossi was a step in front of Morgan as they walked into Hotch and Reid’s hospital room, and the immediate wide grin on his face instantly drained a clawing tension from Morgan’s spine and shoulders that he hadn’t even been aware of carrying. Unconsciously, he sped up to race Prentiss through the door, grinning as she shoved back at him and rolled her eyes at the bustle to get through first.

“Children, please,” said a soft, welcome voice, and Morgan stopped bickering with Prentiss and found himself looking at the tired smile of JJ, curled up catlike in the orange armchair next to Hotch’s bed. Someone had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and another over her knees. The forced efficiency of the fold of the blankets had Morgan suspecting a nurse had done so, giving quiet permission to her being here.

Reid was sitting upright in his bed, one leg dangling over the edge, fighting with Aureilo over possession of a blue jello cup. A fight he appeared to be losing as the hare stuck his paw into the top of the cup and almost overset it into Reid’s lap, earning them a sharp _behave_ from Hotch.

_Hotch._

“Goddamnit, Aaron, if you wanted to have a flying dæmon, you could have borrowed Eris,” Rossi roared, startling both Reid and Aureilo into ceasing the jello war and snapping their heads around to look. “You didn’t have to go throwing Hal off of a cliff to try and outdo me.”

Hotch’s mouth thinned into a disapproving line at Rossi’s joviality, but the corners of his eyes still smiled. “I’m considering,” he said slowly, and all noise in the room ceased for a moment as they waited for whatever bombshell he was about to drop, “requesting that all dæmons be tied to their humans. Perhaps some kind of retractable leash. I feel this would solve many of our problems.”

Silence as they processed this, then JJ laughed. It was a startled, involuntary noise, and no one looked more surprised by it than she did. “Eris would look lovely in pink,” she said finally, covering her mouth with her hand and looking uncertain, like maybe laughing wasn’t okay to do just yet. Morgan smiled tightly, nodded when her worried blue gaze met his, and checked his cell, the time.

It was time.

“Back in a sec,” he muttered to Emily as the woman moved past him to kneel next to JJ, their heads bowing together as they talked softly, and then he and Naemaria backed out of the room.  Taking a deep breath, he followed the corridor in a loose circle to the gated section the children were in. A nurse checked his ID, smiled sadly, and let him in.

Three heads turned to look at him as he walked towards them. The social worker’s hound dæmon didn’t even react, examining a gambolling lamb painted on the wall carefully. The social worker on the other hand looked worn and pleased to see him, holding her free hand out to shake. “Agent Morgan,” she greeted. “Ally has been talking about you.”

Looking down, he met Ally’s serious gaze as she smiled and patted Naemaria carefully on the head. “Heya, Ally,” he said softly, crouching to meet her eye-line. “You ready to go see your brother?” Flakamor was a boxer, almost as tall as Naemaria but half as wide, his dark eyes cold and worried. “You know that he’s going to be a little different, don’t you?”

“Mellissa said he’s not well,” Ally said, running her—mercifully clean—thumb against her lip thoughtfully as though considering sucking on it. A leftover comfort from when she’d last been allowed to be a child, all that time ago. “That he’s not gonna be well ever again, but that he’s still Jack. And that he misses me and loves me even if he can’t say so.”

“He does miss you,” Morgan agreed, standing and flinching as his knees crackled loudly. Ally smirked. “Do you know if Aisling was with the dæmons recovered?” he asked the social worker in a lowered tone, feeling Ally watching them carefully and considering all they said.

“From what we understand, Aisling was one of the dæmons that was…” Her throat worked hard to swallow around the horror of what she’d almost said. “I’m afraid not. It doesn’t seem likely that she will be.”

Damn.

A small hand crept into his, slim fingers wrapping around two of his own. Ally’s hand was too little to hold any more. His heart ached. “I want to see Jack now,” she said firmly, tugging him towards the door. “ _Please_.” He held her hand close as they entered the room. Jack was in the same position as the last time Morgan had seen him, turning his head disinterestedly to stare at them. Then, something. A spark. He looked at Ally, looked away, and then looked back.

And smiled. Thin and shaky and barely there, but it was a smile.

“Ally,” he whispered, his voice harsh. “Hi.”

Morgan watched as the girl tore her hand from his with a sob and hurtled to the chair, flinging herself into the thin circle of her brother’s arms and burying her head against his chest. Flakamor barked, bouncing into the air and shifting midway into a parrot that flew around them before finally alighting as a cat on the edge of the seat and wrapping himself around the two, purring frantically.

There was a sniff, barely audible under Ally’s excited rambling and Jack’s muted replies. Morgan looked to the social worker, and found her head turned away from the children so they couldn’t see her tears. “He’s going to be okay,” she explained, seeing his glance. “Despite everything, look at him. He’s not giving up. Stubborn as sin and all for his sister.”

Morgan did look. Jack had his mouth pressed against his sister’s head, his own eyes wide with emotion, whispering intently to her. He’d survive. He might even live again. He had a job to do—looking after his sister—and he wouldn’t give up until it was done.

“Yeah,” he agreed, smiling and stooping slightly to rest his hand against Naemaria’s rough-smooth coat. “Don’t worry. I know the type. He’ll stay for her.”

Different, but still okay.

 

* * *

 

It appeared as though the nurses were evenly split between furious at Reid for the increased damage Aureilo had caused to their bodies by their instance upon being involved in the remainder of the investigation, or being completely smitten with his sheepish smiles and soft apologies for being a bother. Hotch watched them alternate between frowning at Reid or melting over him, and hid his amusement behind a stern face that had Reid flushing nervously every time he looked over. Hal lay beside him, his arm looped over her shoulder, and her breathing a steady, comforting rhythm against him.

Hairline fracture in her hind leg and muscle damage in her flank and hindquarters. She’d limp. But it would heal.

They’d be okay.

Will arrived with Henry in his arms and Garcia bursting in moments behind them. Emily disappeared soon after, to procure more jello cups to try and stave off the bitter battle that had sprung up between Morgan, Reid, and Aureilo. Hotch grudgingly let Garcia fuss over Hal’s cast for a short time before she bustled off to smother Reid. JJ took Will’s hand and the three vanished from the room, to reconnect. Hotch envied them that. He missed Jack with a fierceness that hurt. They’d spoken on the phone, but Jack had a game playing on the console in the background and was distracted, fidgety. Jessica promised not to tell him that Hotch was in hospital. There was no point scaring him.

They had one more visitor.

“Agent Hotchner, Agent Rossi,” said a cool voice, and Hotch looked up to find the Director of the FBI standing in the doorway with his coat over his arm and a grim expression. “Doctor Reid. How are you all?”

“Well, thank you,” Reid said politely, and Rossi took Garcia’s arm, nodded pertly, and tugged her from the room. The man strode in, clicking the door shut firmly and turning to face them. By his side, his cougar dæmon stood proud and predatory. Hal stiffened. Hotch slid his arm from her, not wishing to appear invalid or insecure for the conversation he felt was coming.

“Doctor Reid, it is my understanding that your dæmon was held captive by Jeremy and Anton Harper for an extended period of time within the building where the Intercision occurred?” Director Morrow said, looking past Hotch to address the agent directly.

“Correct,” Reid answered, without offering more information. He was picking up on the uncertain undercurrent in the room as well. The Director of the FBI didn’t come visiting just because his agents were hurt in the field.

“We would ask your cooperation in ascertaining the events that occurred during that time period,” Morrow continued, smiling sharply. Hotch immediately straightened. “Especially regarding the event of Intercision he may have witnessed.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Aureilo snapped, sitting upright. Hotch watched Morrow’s eyebrows twitch upwards in shock. “I was in a cage the whole time. Then I was in the van. I saw nothing of interest to you.”

Silence. Reid’s gaze was locked on Morrow’s, not wavering in the slightest, and there was a suspicion on the Director’s own face that had Hal’s hackles lifting minutely. “Very well,” he said finally, in a tone that suggested this was not the last of this topic. “Agent Hotchner, I would request a moment of your time. Alone. Perhaps once you have returned home.”

“I can go,” Reid said, slipping out the bed and almost scurrying to the door with Aureilo in his arms, pyjama legs flapping. Hotch winced, imagining the nurses’ faces if they saw him up and about, but he was already gone.

“How are you feeling, Agent Hotchner?” Morrow asked, smiling again. A wolf smile, like Hal when she was hunting. “Your doctor seems adamant that you suffered little in the way of long-lasting damage from your dæmon’s fall.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Hotch said. He didn’t like that he was laying down. He didn’t like that the man was standing over him. And he didn’t like at all the way the man’s eyes had lingered on Aureilo. “You’re not here to ask about my health, or the health of my team.”

Morrow laughed, and that wasn’t wolf-like at all. Hal had never laughed so coldly. “I appreciate your desire to have this done with. This was a terrible case, simply terrible. The Bureau is very interested in ensuring that nothing of the sort ever occurs again. The fear it creates is simply untenable.”

“I believe that any documentation owned by the Harpers on Intercision was stored within the building that burned down.” Hotch watched Morrow as he nodded slowly. “It’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure what happened in there, and how their detailed information on the act was gained. We can only theorise that during the course of her studies Marissa Harper discovered what she shouldn’t have. It does look as though she completed the Intercision on her son, Anton, before withdrawing from society. Hospital records after her death indicate that there were some aspects of mental illness that contributed to that withdrawal, likely triggered by her guilt. From Jeremy’s confession, we can gather that he derives pleasure from the pliability of the Intercised children. We can’t establish much more than that without extensive interviewing. Any information that isn’t contained within those two men burned with the house.”

“The house,” Morrow said, straightening. “That burned remarkably conveniently when everyone had been removed from it. Forensics believe the blaze began in a room containing extensive paperwork and documentation. It does seem awfully… serendipitous, does it not? Suspicious almost.”

“Perhaps. I was elsewhere at the time the blaze occurred, as was my team with me. We can offer little in the way of explanation—the forensics team will be better placed to answer your questions.”

The silence lengthened. “And Doctor Reid?” Morrow said finally, and it was exactly what Hotch had been waiting for. “I understand he is able to achieve great distances from his dæmon at will. That’s a lost art… very much like Intercision.”

“Never entered the building. The team will confirm this. He has no knowledge of Intercision, or of the act of it. His abilities with Aureilo draw from a partial Severing he underwent several years ago, while working the Tobias Hankel case. Everything you wish to know about that is in the Bureau archives.” Any information they wanted, for good or for bad, would not be found here. Intercision would die with the Harpers.

The door clicked open and a hangdog-looking Reid slunk back in, shepherded by a nurse and a grinning Rossi. Morrow stepped back, the air of interrogation broken, and took his leave.

“Director,” Reid called, and fixed the man with a look that Hotch had only ever seen on his own face, a steely kind of determination that spoke to the man he’d become. “The blade that was used to Intercise the children? Every account of blades capable of the act has them as an iron alloy of variable metallurgical origins—but none that would be destroyed by a house fire. What happened to Anton’s blade?”

Morrow didn’t look back. “It has been dealt with, Dr. Reid. Your concern is duly noted. Good day. I wish you all a speedy recovery—and look forward to seeing you back in the field.” And he was gone.

“Trouble, Aaron?” Dave asked sweetly. Hotch glared at him, feeling Hal growl in the back of her throat.

“We’re going to talk,” he promised his friend, trying to sound firm. “You and I.”

“Oh goody. I look forward to it.”.

Sometimes, Hotch wondered about this team.

 

* * *

 

It took them four days to reluctantly release Hotch from the hospital, Reid with him. Rossi suspected that Reid had likely sweet talked his way out, judging by the weary look the nurse had given him as he’d signed his release papers.

There was one last thing Rossi wanted to do before the jet left, and it had been a damn challenge to organize it without the rest of the team getting wind and accusing him of getting soft in his old age. Bah. He was entitled to a bit of softness. They all were, especially after a case like this.

The air was cold, the sky clear and blue. Mist fogged in front of his mouth as he worked his hands together, the bitter morning biting at any exposed skin. Just him and the man working the crank that lowered the unadorned boxes into their final resting place. They deserved to be buried. They deserved this, this final resting place on a shaded hill with a view of the frosted morning and the leafless trees. Not cremation and a box somewhere dusty and forgotten to never be claimed because they’d died without names, too young to have any records that would identify them.

His hand hadn’t faltered as he’d signed the cheques for the headstones that would stand above them. Above them, and above those yet to be buried. The bodies that were still being processed, cut and studied by those curious and grieved by the practices that had been wrought upon them. He’d ensured a plot for them all, a neat little row of lost children like a fairy tale of old.

And upon each of them a date. A blank gold disk to symbolize a dæmon lost before it was known. A simple line:

**Somebody’s Beloved Rests Here**

A cough behind him, dry and familiar. He could almost hear the anxious neediness in it. He smiled through the burning behind his eyes, and didn’t hide the tears. Fuck it. Fuck being composed or dignified or whatever. They were his team, and these were the bodies of murdered children being mourned by no one but the men and women who hunted monsters. They deserved some goddamn tears, for the families who didn’t know to cry for them.

And his team.

His goddamn team. Of course they’d found him. Despite his care, despite him slipping out before the dawn had even broken. Despite it all, like hounds, they’d snuffed him out and come to sorrow with him. Never alone.

Eris stayed silent on his shoulder, but he could feel her sad pleasure as they stepped up beside him in a ragged line of sleepy eyes and ruffled clothes. One of them, probably Reid—the only one who slept so lightly a sneezing mouse could wake him—had heard him leave, or woken and noted his empty room. Maybe Aaron, the only one who’d shake himself awake before the dawn broke to do a quiet pace of the hotel to ensure all was well and would have noted his missing car. Whoever it was, he imagined them rousing the others, snapping them all to wakefulness, then gathering in a dazed huddle, plotting, planning, fucking following him.

He was glad of it. Someone took his hand. A small, delicate hand, one that was ill-suited to handle a gun and did it anyway. JJ. Her other hand held Henry’s, and the boy was rugged up into a fluffy ball of coats and jackets, two of which looked frumpy enough that Rossi suspected they were Reid’s. Will slung an arm around JJ’s hip, his son tucked between them, and rested his chin on her shoulder with his gentle eyes on the row of graves. His Alsatian dæmon sat to his side, Kailo on her head and a fluttering moth dancing around her throat, delighting in the clean lift of the fresh morning air.

Morgan and Garcia pressed together. Garcia’s nose was red with the cold, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes gleamed behind brightly coloured glasses. Morgan didn’t cry, he wasn’t the type, but when the sun broke above the trees and brought the promise of warmth, he closed his eyes and lifted his face to it as though praying.

Hotch stood slightly apart, an unmarked hospital-issue cane in his hand to help stay the limp that he was doggedly determined to ignore. Hal had hobbled to reach there, but now they were still she stood with all the grace and self-contained dignity they both carried. They alone looked alert.

Reid stood to his other side, his head tilted like his hare’s and eyes scanning and counting, mind ticking, constantly thinking. And grieving. He could see it lining every inch of the man’s young face, forming shadows that would later become deep marks around his mouth and eyes to mark time passage on him. Aureilo stood on his other side, upright and formal, a mirror image of Hotch and his wolf on the far side of their group. A mirror image until Prentiss stepped up beside them both, slid her arm through Reid’s, and pressed her winter-red cheek to his shoulder, her cat butting the hare onto four legs and playfully twining around him.

They stayed like this, his team, until all the boxes were lowered and earth began to fill the neat holes left behind. Their faces were dry by this point, the sun risen and weakly warm, and Henry fidgety and bored with proceedings. Then they left together without a word, but each nodded to Rossi as they walked away and every face was open with a kind of fierce pride that would have made him blush if he was any less self-assured.

Reid gravitated to Morgan’s side as they walked towards their car, and their laughter carried back towards him. Hotch limped, stopped, and shook his head in frustration, until Emily distracted him with a sharp retort and a sly smile that had him almost grinning. Almost. But he did lean slightly less on the cane as they walked away. Garcia babbled to Henry, who looked to his father. Will looked both exhausted and amused, and Rossi didn’t blame him. JJ walked beside him. Eris hooted softly to her, reverently. Rossi remembered a promise he’d made in a nightmare.

“I’m proud of you,” he said, catching her arm and pulling her back. She blinked and looked at him, thrown. Shadows lingered in her eyes. She’d be doubting her place on the team, in her job. It was only natural. She needed to know they’d stand by her no matter what she chose. “For what you did in there. You held it together and you got everyone out. Those that couldn’t walk, you carried. You did a damn hero’s job, Jennifer. Those children that survived, they’ll never forget what you did for them—and neither will I.”

“I didn’t save all of them.” Her voice was sad, shuttered. Dragging all the guilt of the world close and hoarding it. “Which of them is the boy? The one I left?”

“Third to the right.” He’d made sure. He’d known she’d ask. Next to that boy lay the girl he’d carried from the sewers. One of the girls found with Jack was next to her. The other had gone to her shell-shocked grandmother to be buried. Finally home. No one had found Amber Wyant. The girl had gone to the wind, run away, maybe finally to a better place. He doubted they would find her. She’d been hurt too badly the last time she’d stopped running, hurt badly enough that he wouldn’t blame her if she never stopped again.

JJ turned and looked at the grave he’d named. “I left him,” she said again, and closed her eyes for a moment. “I left him and when I came back, he was dead.”

“He was dead when the knife fell between him and his dæmon,” Rossi corrected. “All you did was carry him that final distance. You got yourself out. You kept yourself alive. You came home to us—to your family. And so much more. We revel in our victories and we learn from our failures, but we let neither consume us or this job will destroy us. There were no failures here. Not on your behalf.”

She nodded once, uncertain. Then once more, steadier. “Okay,” she said finally, and breathed again. “Okay. What you did here today… it was good, Dave. _Is_ good. These children deserve this. They deserve to be remembered. Thanks to you, they will be.”

Rossi smiled and glanced over at the team, lingering on Reid. “Oh, I don’t think there’s any fear of them being forgotten.”

They didn’t leave that town as they’d arrived. They carried new scars, new wounds, new aches that would linger and twinge on cold nights. New weights that would take a long time to heal. But, looking at Reid and the easy way he and his dæmon moved together once more, the careful banter between him and Morgan that had been missing, the hint of spine and anger in JJ’s gaze that reminded her of why she did what she did in this job…

Maybe they were stronger.

In fact, he was sure they were.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything.”_
> 
> Philip Pullman,  **His Dark Materials**

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


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